A. J. Jacobs, The Year of Living Constitutionally

Steve Thomas: A.J., thank you for joining me on the podcast.

A. J. Jacobs: Thank you, Steve. I’m delighted to be here. I’m a big fan of libraries. My mother was a docent at the New York Public Library for many years, so it’s close to my heart.

Steve Thomas: Great. Yeah, we’re going up to New York on a vacation this summer, and I told my wife already, the New York Public Library has got to be on the list.

A. J. Jacobs: You gotta see, is it Fortitude and Patience, I think are the names…?

Steve Thomas: Yep, yep. The lions.

A. J. Jacobs: Gotta say hi to them.

Steve Thomas: And I just heard recently that they have like the original Winnie the Pooh and I was like, “Oh, I gotta go see the original Winnie the Pooh.

A. J. Jacobs: Oh yeah. Like not the book, the actual stuffed animal. Yeah. No, it’s awesome.

Steve Thomas: Awesome. So, you don’t mention it in the book, but Ben Franklin actually created the first lending library, so he sort of created public libraries.

A. J. Jacobs: Right. No, he is my hero, and that is one of the reasons. Yeah. He did the lending library, and so much more. And he wrote an essay on farting. So, what’s not to love?

Steve Thomas: And we won’t count his illegitimate children he probably has around the world.

A. J. Jacobs: That’s true. Yes, he had flaws. He had flaws, as all the Founding Fathers did. He, I think, had fewer flaws than most of them.

Steve Thomas: Yes. He was a celebrity in this time. I mean, he was like a big shot.

A. J. Jacobs: Right. Exactly, and actually I’m watching Franklin in Paris, the show, I think it’s on Max with Michael Douglas playing Ben Franklin. And like you say, he’s a celebrity and he played it up. He wore his fur cap to pretend that he was just a pioneer from the back country, even though he was the most sophisticated man in America.

Steve Thomas: That’s one thing I was going to ask about, and we’ll get into the book more here later, but when you were dressing to be as part of the time, that’s more like what the military and the high-up people, what kind of clothing was like the everyday person wearing around those times? They weren’t wearing the fancy coats and the tricorn hats and everything all day long.

A. J. Jacobs: Well, they had very simple clothing and not a lot of it because it was expensive, so you would only have a couple of shirts. And any historian, clothe historians, please email me to correct me. But yeah, you would just wear it and I can’t, I mean, that is one of the things that I just can’t wrap my mind around is what the past must have smelt like. I think there’s actually an interesting book that I haven’t read, but I have in my bookshelf on the smells of the past, because it was a rank place.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, I guess you just got used to it? If we went there, we’d be disgusted, but they just, it always smelled like horse poop, so…

A. J. Jacobs: Right. There you go. Exactly. The human capacity to acculturate to almost anything.

Steve Thomas: And I assume your wife would not let you take part in that part of history

A. J. Jacobs: in this book.

I did decide to bathe, yes, which was not part of their daily ritual.

Steve Thomas: This book and a lot of your other books tend to be you fully throwing yourself into a subject, immersing yourself completely in it. What’s the value of that to you? Like, how does that help you learn more about the concept that you’re working on?

A. J. Jacobs: Well, I love it. I think it’s an amazing way to learn about something. And I did it with this new one about the Constitution as sort of a sequel to the one I did about the Bible, where I live by the Bible, and I live by all the rules, but I also grew the beard, and I wore the robe, and I think there is something valuable in walking the walk and talking the talk and wearing the tricorn because you do get an insight into how life is.

I mean, I don’t delude myself. Their life was very different and thank God I don’t have to do that. I would have taken antibiotics had I gotten sick. I’m not going to go full leech and bloodletting but there’s a lot of research that even just wearing different clothes affects the way you think. So I am a big fan of going all in.

Steve Thomas: So the new book is the Year of Living Constitutionally. We’ve talked around it a little bit, but what’s the basic push behind the book? What’s the concept?

A. J. Jacobs: Sure. Well, I started it a couple of years ago for two reasons. First, every day I would see another news story about the Constitution and what a massive impact it was having on our lives, and I knew very little about it. I had never even read it from start to finish. It turns out most Americans have not, according to polls. So I thought, okay, one goal would be to give readers and myself a crash course in the founding document. What does it really mean? What does it say?

And the second reason I wanted to do this is because I wanted to talk about how to interpret the Constitution, because there is a movement called originalism, which the conservative majority on the Supreme Court subscribes to, and the idea of that is that the most important part of the Constitution is what it meant when it was ratified back in 1789, or whenever the amendment might have been ratified.

This is no small thing. This has had a massive impact on how Americans live our lives. Women’s rights and guns and religion. So I thought, that’s interesting. Let me see what it’s like to actually be the ultimate originalist and to take that super seriously and follow the original meaning of the Constitution using the mindset and technology of our founders, which meant carrying a musket around New York City, or writing pamphlets with a quill pen instead of going on social media. And try to figure out first, are the originalists on the Supreme Court actually following the original meaning? And second, is that the best way to interpret our Constitution? Or do we need to evolve the meaning of the Constitution more to fit with changes? So that was the origin of this project.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, because the opposite of that is that it’s a living document and it changes meaning as it goes along and like you said, now the majority on the Supreme Court is pushing us back to originalism, but once you went through the book, how did you end up landing on that?

A. J. Jacobs: Well, I do, as a writer, like to “steel man” both sides, so meaning the opposite of “straw man.” So I do, I do try to present the strongest argument for originalism that I can, but in the end, I do not think that original meaning is the most important thing. It’s an element. Living constitutionalism kind of has a lot of baggage as a phrase. Like, how can a document be living? That does seem a little strange. I prefer calling it pragmatism or pluralism, where you take into account several factors, such as the original meaning of the text, but also how has society changed, and how will a Supreme Court opinion on guns or on women’s health, how will that affect society now? And how has the Supreme Court ruled in the last 30 years? You want to have some sort of continuity. So all of these can play in.

And it’s how I make decisions in my own life. I count a lot of factors, you know, what does logic say? What are my emotions saying? How will it affect my descendants, my 18th great grandkid. So all of these things come in, and to me, that’s a more American way to approach the document. And I think it’s all about balance. The Founding Fathers were very into balance, balance of powers and well, they thought balance of humors in your body, which turned out not to be true, but balance is a very American value.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, and I feel like they built in the concept of being able to amend the document over time. So they knew that it was going to have to change over time. It feels like it’s almost in the document itself that this should not be taken word for word here and we should change it as time goes on.

A. J. Jacobs: Right. The problem is that they made it harder to amend than they meant to. They did not foresee that we would have these two rigid parties, frozen and opposing each other. They would be shocked that it is so hard to amend. We haven’t had an amendment since 1992. And I’m not a fortune teller, but I don’t see one coming in a long time.

Steve Thomas: Nobody even seems to bring it up anymore.

A. J. Jacobs: Right. Well, I have a chapter where I interviewed the guy who actually pushed through the last amendment in the early 90s, Greg Watson, and it’s a hilarious, fascinating, inspiring story. But that was the most bipartisan least controversial amendment you can imagine, which was that Congress should not give itself a raise. It can give the next Congress a raise, but you shouldn’t be allowed to say, “Oh, I now make a million dollars.” But even today, I don’t know if that would get through.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, you’re right. A lot of the founding fathers were, like you said, very opposed to parties. Washington, in particular, just did not think that that was the way to go forward, but obviously that came up very quickly. I mean, just what in the second or third election that we ever had and then all of a sudden, here’s parties.

A. J. Jacobs: Exactly. James Madison knew that there would be what he called factions, but he thought there would be many factions. It would be almost like a European Parliament with eight or nine different factions and they would all have shifting alliances and then you get a majority, but America, no, we split in two and we are stuck there, which is a problem.

At the end I come up with some actual pragmatic reforms of what we can do to make democracy safer, and one of them is, yeah, let’s try to make it easier to have other parties.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, like they’re not going to amend the Constitution to make amending easier.

A. J. Jacobs: Right, well it’s a catch-22. You can’t amend the Constitution without amending the way you amend the Constitution.

Steve Thomas: But with all this talk about originalism, the original founders intended Congress to be the most powerful of the three bodies and that’s not where we are now. It’s almost getting to the point where it’s the least powerful. How do you think the founders would see the way we have the government laid out today?

A. J. Jacobs: Oh, I think they’d be appalled. They would be appalled by so much. They would be appalled by the lack of virtue. They were worried that we didn’t have enough virtue and self-restraint, and I do worry about that myself. They would be shocked by how powerful the president is and how powerful the Supreme Court is. Like you said, Congress was number one.

And as part of my adventure, so my adventure was part of the book is just talking to great Constitutional scholars to get this crash course, but part is actually living it and trying to express my rights the way they did. So that meant carrying a musket around New York City. And as I say, Oh, I petitioned the government. Cause that’s in the first amendment. And I did it the old way with actual paper and quill pens, and I got hundreds of signatures, but my petition was all about trying to restrain the power of the president to make it more like what the founders envisioned and the way I did it, the actual petition was an idea from my favorite, Ben Franklin, and several other delegates that we should not have a single president. As someone said at the Constitutional Convention, that is the fetus of monarchy. They were shocked that someone would bring it up. We just fought to get rid of a king, and now you want an elected king? So, Franklin suggested twelve presidents, other delegates said three, and eventually it was voted, seven states voted for a single president, three voted for multiple presidents. So two states, if they had switched their vote, we would have multiple presidents.

So I wrote that as a petition and I brought it to Senator Ron Wyden from Oregon. I had my tricorn hat and I had the whole outfit and he was actually very, he’s like, “this is very interesting,” which meant he considered it for five seconds, but he agreed with my idea that the president needs to be constrained. He brought me in front of a group, like a scrum of reporters. I’d never done a press conference, but I was in front of all these Washington reporters to talk about it. And I actually agree with them. I don’t think we want Biden, Trump, and RFK Jr., like, co working in the White House, but there are ways to constrain the president. We should go back to where the president does not have war power. We should have Congress have more power over trade and various other ways to constrain the president. So even without going to the three president mode.

Steve Thomas: Well, and in that trio, I guess that that dead worm in his brain would be the vice president or

I love it.

Part of the cabinet. I don’t know.

A. J. Jacobs: It has half a vote. Half a vote. Yeah.

Steve Thomas: And the Constitution itself even has; I don’t think anybody would question that it has some troubling elements in it. It expressly allows slavery and says, is it 20 years that the international trade will be done? But after that, it doesn’t really have anything to say about it. It’s just kind of no more international slave trade, but sure, keep going outside of that. Can you talk a little bit about how Frederick Douglass changed his mind about it, because I guess I’m thinking of it being this problematic document at the beginning, but there are elements in it that can reform itself.

A. J. Jacobs: Yeah, well I love that, and you’re right, that is, that was one of the most inspiring parts of this book, was researching that, because there are, you could argue, and people have argued, it was written by 55 white men, some of whom were slaveholders. Why should we even pay attention to this document? And that was the position of William Lloyd Garrison, who was an abolitionist before the Civil War, a white man who said, it’s a pact with the devil and he burned the Constitution, literally. He burned it on stage in front of hundreds of spectators. He was a showman.

And originally Frederick Douglass, also a great abolitionist and a former enslaved man. At first, Frederick Douglass agreed with him, but somewhere in the 1850s, Frederick Douglass, like you said, changed his mind, and he said, I think it would be more productive to reframe how we look at the Constitution. Instead of a pact with the devil, let’s think of it as a promissory note. It has all of these wonderful ideas about equality and liberty, blessings of liberty, and the general welfare, but America is not living up to those ideals. So let’s make America live up to the promissory note that is the Constitution. The seeds of the Constitution contain the solution to the problems within the Constitution itself.

 That is a theme that has been echoed by Martin Luther King and Barack Obama, and I just find it a very powerful way to look at the Constitution.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, just because they didn’t mean “we the people” to include women or black people or Native Americans or anybody else like that doesn’t mean that we can’t say that that’s what that means. It means everybody.

A. J. Jacobs: Exactly. And, and I am so grateful for that phrase “we the people,” which I learned was originally going to be, “we, the people of Rhode Island New Hampshire…” and luckily, I forget, it might’ve been Gouverneur Morris or Rufus King, there were a couple who said, no, just make it “we the people” and that was a big difference.

Steve Thomas: Yeah. At one point, I know there was a point, at least by the Civil War, that before then, a lot of times it was just, here’s this collection of states, and we’re sort of loosely together. And then at some point, it was, now we are the United States. It was like before, it was, we’re just a bunch of states that are united, but now we are the United States of America, and we’re one thing now, and that was a big change at some point in the history.

A. J. Jacobs: Yeah, like they used to call it, these United States. And, yeah, Lincoln was certainly one of the prime movers and trying to reformulate it as not just a collection, not like the European union, where it’s a collection of states, this is one country.

It is interesting though, how much power the states had initially in our history. The Bill of Rights initially did not apply to states. It was just restraining the federal government. And that was one of my adventures, because I was trying to live these rights. So the First Amendment was shocking to me, because I’m a huge fan of the First Amendment, as I imagine most librarians are, hopefully all, but I realized I’m a fan of the modern First Amendment, which is much more expansive than the original First Amendment, partly thanks to Jehovah’s Witnesses, who brought a bunch of suits in the 20th century, which is another fascinating story. But in the beginning, it was much more constrained, so we do not want to go back to the originalist First Amendment.

Again, it was only that the federal government was restrained from stopping speech before it happened. States were free to punish speech in multiple ways and did. New York had blasphemy laws and laws against cursing, which I decided to resurrect because I have teenage sons. So I said, all right, let’s go back to this New York state law where you have to pay 37 and a half cents every time you curse or blaspheme. And I set up a jar and they got out of it by saying, “Oh, we don’t have a half cent.” So that was their loophole. But I am grateful for the expansion of the First Amendment, but not the original conception of the First Amendment as much.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, and I think you mentioned that there’s several states that just decided to have their own official religion, too, because only the federal government couldn’t set up a religion, but states could, according to them.

A. J. Jacobs: I was so surprised that I didn’t know, yeah, depending how you define established religion, but yeah, Connecticut, I believe, was Congregationalist was their established religion. And that meant things such as if you weren’t that religion, you couldn’t serve on a jury, it might affect your taxes, all sorts of things.

Yeah, it was a very different world. That was one of the big takeaways. The past is really a foreign country and we don’t want to go back to it. That said, there are parts of it that I found incredibly inspiring, like this idea of virtue and self-sacrifice, and I’m amazed by some of the sacrifices that our ancestors made, but it’s also a very different country and not just because it smelled, but also for many, many reasons we don’t want to return.

Steve Thomas: You mentioned your sons not participating in the cursing part of it. How do your sons and your wife react to, this project in particular, but the ones that you do where you’re totally in on it? I know you’ve mentioned that a lot of that stuff in the Bible book as well, of your wife being a saint of patience, basically the patron saint of patience, but how do they interact with your projects themselves?

A. J. Jacobs: Well, it’s very mixed. Sometimes they are appalled and embarrassed. When I wore my tricorn hat around New York or bore my musket, they would not come within 50 yards of me. That said, one of them actually did get into it, he’s 20 years old, and for the first time in my life, I had a compatriot as he would come with me to Times Square and get signatures or ask soldiers to quarter with us and he sort of saw it as performance art, which I thought was great.

On the other hand, there were parts such as the women’s rights in early America. Not great, as you can imagine. There was something called coverture, which was how women were basically treated like children. And when you married, you lost even more rights. So married women, in most states, could not sign contracts. And my wife owns a business, an event business, and signs contracts every day. So I gingerly brought up, well, during this project, maybe I should take that over, since I am committing to this and at first, she was like, “Great, I hate signing these contracts, what a pain.”

And then I tried, she had me do it for an hour and I made such a mess of it. She is so much more financially savvy that I was fired. She fired me and took it back. So that was not a success.

Steve Thomas: And I remember in the Bible book, too, that she did not like the beard.

A. J. Jacobs: She wouldn’t kiss me for seven months. And another part she didn’t like in the Bible book is Leviticus, if you take it really literally and strictly, it says that you should not touch women when they’re menstruating. But even more, that if a menstruating woman sits on a seat, the seat becomes impure. So my wife found that offensive and she sat in every seat in our apartment while she was menstruating. So I had to stand for most of the year, and I was honestly proud of her. I’m proud of her for doing that because I think it’s very clever.

Steve Thomas: It complicates your work a little bit, but…

A. J. Jacobs: Yes, exactly.

Steve Thomas: Well, may everyone have a partner as patient as yours.

A. J. Jacobs: Well, I mean, I don’t write about the parts where she loses patience in a way that would not be flattering to either of us.

Steve Thomas: That’s like when people ask like, “Oh, your kids just smile all the time.” I was like, “Well, I don’t share the pictures with you when they’re doing a temper tantrum.”

A. J. Jacobs: Exactly.

Steve Thomas: You did take part in some reenactments as well. Was that a helpful way to even more immersing yourselves into that?

A. J. Jacobs: Yes. I joined the Third New Jersey Regiment of Revolutionary War Reenactors. I mean, I wanted to join a constitutional convention reenactment, but they don’t really exist. As humans, we kind of like the gun smoke and that guy, instead of the signing of documents, but it was illuminating in some ways, even, as I say, just dressing up because I participated in the Battle of Monmouth in New Jersey in August. It was super-hot, I was wearing my wool coat, I was carrying this 10 pound musket and all of this other equipment, and of course I never came close to feeling what it was like to be in an actual battle in the Revolutionary War, but I still got a sense of how uncomfortable it was. I did end up dying, but I died in the shade, which was so it wasn’t so bad.

But even something, this is just a very small example I became, grateful for many things during, I’m more grateful than ever for democracy, and I’m also more grateful for elastic in my socks, because I would put on these socks, and they were these wool stockings. They don’t have elastic, so they would fall down to my ankles. So I would have to wear sock belts. So every day I’d have to spend a minute putting little belts on my socks. They weren’t even garters. They were just tiny belts you put on your socks. So the amount of time, I do find it astounding sometimes that these founders had enough time to do all, I guess they outsourced a lot of it in, in unpleasant ways, but it is it is amazing that they were able to create a country when they had to put on sock belts and even just traveling to Philadelphia would take days.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, that’s why there had to be so much time between the election and the inauguration so they can actually get people places and you can’t just do it in a couple of months.

A. J. Jacobs: Right. And I actually, it had a big impact because part of the idea of the electoral college was because they couldn’t imagine how they could count all the votes and bring them all together. So they were like, well, let’s just make it so that the electors are the ones whose votes are counted. And of course that has caused massive problems in modern America.

Steve Thomas: Yes. And another thing that we do differently now, and that you did a lot of, is writing with your quill pen, you mentioned earlier. And it took longer for things to get places, so now you have a quippy little reply to something, you just type it out real quick on Twitter, X, Threads, whatever you’re using there, and send it out, but there you had to write out a letter, you had to get it in the mail. Did you like that part, a slower pace of life in the communication era?

A. J. Jacobs: I found, yes, writing longhand was a huge revelation because, like you said I couldn’t just thumb text an angry response, I’d have to think about it, I’d have to write it, I’d have to send it. It was like a waiting period for my thoughts, and it was much harder to rage write, and I do think that that is something helpful. Also, when you’re writing with a quill, you don’t have the dings and pings that are distracting you. So I do think it changed the way I thought, and maybe made me a little more of a subtle thinker, I hope. I don’t think we all have to go to the quill, but just the idea of writing offline in any way is so important.

Likewise, I tried to replicate a little, the slower pace of media because Ben Franklin’s newspaper would come out, say, twice a week. So you would read it for whatever, half an hour, and then you could digest it. You could discuss it with your friends as opposed to now where we have this 16 hours a day, fire hose of negativity and just the worst, most biased information And it’s very hard to think when you are being bombarded with that, and you can react in the moment emotionally, but I like the idea of taking time to digest it and come up with solutions as opposed to just reacting with rage and shock.

Steve Thomas: And that leads to the last big topic I wanted to bring up, and it brings it back to libraries, too, that libraries are about building communities. And one of the ways that we do that is facilitating conversations together civilly. That’s something that you feel like you write about is missing from America now, too but that was something that was majorly important to the Founding Fathers was having robust debate.

A. J. Jacobs: Oh, yeah. And I love that libraries, any programming where you can bring people together physically, the right to peaceably assemble… or assemble…. it was “peaceably to assemble.” They didn’t want to split the infinitive.

So I found that that is first of all, something that the founders did do more of, and I think we need to get back to that, and yeah, as you say, civil debate, trading ideas. I hosted a couple of 18th century themed dinner parties that I loved where we would, I would put on my tricorn and my son who is our chef would make beef stew with cloves. They loved their cloves. I would invite people from all over the political spectrum, and we would discuss it. And I do think, as we’ve mentioned, the Founders had huge flaws, but one virtue that I think should not be underestimated, is that they were more willing to change their mind. They didn’t see it as flip flopping, as something negative. Ben Franklin said, “The older I get, the less certain I am of my own opinions.” And I think that is something to get back to.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, absolutely.

A. J. Jacobs: One of my favorite parts of the book is I’ve tried to revive the election cake tradition from the 18th century because for those who could vote, and it was a restricted group, which of course, thank God we are moving to get away from, but for those who could vote in the late 1700s, it was a celebration. This was an amazing new right. So there was lots of rum. There’s music. It was sort of like Coachella, I guess, very restrained Coachella.

And there was cake. People made election cakes. So as part of this, I got hundreds of people around the country to bake their own election cakes, bring them to the polls, bring them to their work, and the reactions from the bakers and from the public and my own experience was so wonderful because there’s so much negativity around voting. Just having this one positive thing, our catchphrase was, “democracy is sweet” and we want to remind people of that.

So I’m doing it again in November. So if any libraries or just librarians are interested in participating, please just go to my website and contact me, and we’ll tell you how to do it. We’ve got a Facebook page where people share the photos and it’s just a lovely ritual that I hope we can recapture.

Steve Thomas: And you’ve got a recipe as well, right? With cloves?

A. J. Jacobs: Right, exactly. Well, I am not a cake dictator so you can use the original clove recipe, but a lot of it was just about decorating in a creative way. So, whether it’s related to the state, like Georgia had a lot of peaches. People, as they should, made it American and individualistic and inventive.

Steve Thomas: And the last time you did it, you got participants from all 50 states, right?

A. J. Jacobs: All 50 states, absolutely.

Steve Thomas: Hopefully you get the same this year’s.

A. J. Jacobs: Yes, absolutely. I would love it.

Steve Thomas: All right. So our final two questions. The first one is what was your first favorite book? So like when you were a kid, do you remember what the first book was that you loved?

A. J. Jacobs: Oh, that’s a good one. Well, I did love Hungry, Hungry Caterpillar. Was it Hungry, Hungry? Or did I add a “Hungry”?

Steve Thomas: I think it’s the Very Hungry Caterpillar, I think.

A. J. Jacobs: Oh yes. It’s Hungry, Hungry Hippos, the Very Hungry Caterpillar. I just thought it was so creative the way he incorporated the structure of the book into the theme of the book. And yeah, anytime someone reimagines anything in any media, I’m always a fan of… well, not always. I’m sure there are bad ways to do it, but this one was a wonderful way to do it. So that might’ve been my first favorite book.

Steve Thomas: And then the other question is we’re building a summer reading list. So is there a book that you would recommend other people read over the summer?

A. J. Jacobs: Great question. Well, if you are into the Constitution and a Constitution nerd at all, I highly recommend the Notes on the Constitutional Convention by James Madison because you see how fluid and flexible the thoughts were and how in an alternative universe, things could have been so much different. We might have three presidents or presidents that were one year, one term, and then kicked out. It reminds you that we should not be as static and constrained in our thinking that this is the only way to set up government.

Steve Thomas: Great. Well, thank you for exploring all those subjects in your book and in a very entertaining way, and thank you so much for coming on the podcast to talk about it.

A. J. Jacobs: My pleasure. And thanks again to libraries for being a bulwark. Is that the right word? A bulwark of democracy. We really couldn’t have it without you.

Steve Thomas: Great. Thank you so much.

***

Rebecca Vnuk: Welcome to The Circ Desk. I’m Rebecca Vnuk from Library Reads.

Yaika Sabat: And I’m Yaika Sabat from NoveList.

Rebecca Vnuk: And we are talking today on The Circ Desk about narrative nonfiction. So Steve was just talking to AJ Jacobs and the Year of Living Constitutionally, and that got Yaika and I thinking about different kinds of nonfiction and what they might have as appeal factors for people who want to read it for fun and learning, of course, but as opposed to a reference book, for example, where we would just go to find something factual.

And the Library Reads list, I will take this moment to say, please vote for non-fiction. We actually do not have very many non-fiction books at all on the Library Reads list. Our list is always from the start, 10 years’ worth of fiction. Every once in a while, narrative nonfiction sneaks up on there and we’re all excited when we see it. So we decided last summer, actually the summer of 2023 to add Bonus Picks onto our top 10 list and one of them every month would be a nonfiction pick. So we are definitely moving on up in the nonfiction realm there. But, of course, we don’t have anything that matches an exact read-alike for something like the Year of Living Constitutionally.

However, I just wanted to pitch that you can easily go to our archive on the website and you can sort that list by genre and nonfiction is one of the genres. That’s where you will find all of our nonfiction picks. But I think Yaika has some suggestions for actual titles from NoveList and then we’ll chat a little bit about what makes narrative nonfiction so appealing to readers. So Yaika, I’m going to let you take it away with your read-alikes.

Yaika Sabat: This is kind of a unique book. It’s nonfiction. It’s not stuffy, like Rebecca said, but it is well researched. I do love that if you look at the writing style in NoveList, it’s “well-researched and witty,” which I think is like a really perfect balance. It’s also not one that’s going to have a lot of identical read-alikes because it is a unique proposition, you know, as a man taking a year to try and live as closely as possible to the original meaning of the Constitution, which is not something that I think there are tons of books about.

But the thing I like to play around with, usually when I’m trying to find a recommendation in NoveList, is trying out different combinations. So this one, for example, it is a life story, because it’s a look at his life for a moment in time, but it’s also about politics and global affairs and it’s also humor writing. I decided to do some different combinations. So I could give you a couple read-alikes that may not be direct read-alikes, but have some of the same energy of this book, some of the same appeal.

The first one is going to be more on the serious side of things, and that is Reading the Constitution by Stephen Breyer. They are both thought provoking books that look at different types of judicial interpretations of the Constitution. Now, the Year of Living Constitutionally obviously was not done by a Constitutional scholar or anything like that, so it’s more accessible. It’s more through the perspective of the everyday man, whereas Reading the Constitution is going to be a bit more formal, a bit more knowledgeable, but it could be a good counterpart if you’re wanting to explore more about what inspired A. J. Jacobs in his work.

Rebecca Vnuk: I think there’s a great pairing. That’s a really, like, if I was handing this to somebody on the desk, I would love to pair that up with it, right? And like, take both of these.

Yaika Sabat: Well, yeah, because people aren’t naturally most Constitutional scholars. So maybe they are curious when they’re reading the book, give them something that they can reference. Then I wanted to look at the humor side of things. And so I did a combo of sort of “politics” and “global affairs” and “humor writing” sort of that, you know, “witty” was something I definitely looked for and an option for that is Profiles in Ignorance: How America’s Politicians Got Dumb and Dumber by Andy Borowitz. This looks at what is referred to in the description as the intellectual deterioration of American politics.

So it’s going to give you the political side of things and a thought provoking look, but with that humor and that wit that you get in the Year of Living Constitutionally. So although it’s not the same topic, I think it’s going to have a lot of that same experience. And that’s why I think it might be a good read- alike.

Rebecca Vnuk: I think that’s great. I think what this really highlights for library staff is don’t pressure yourself to automatically find a read-alike that you think is exact, whether it’s fiction or non-fiction, right? This is where that reader’s advisory conversation comes in and I know in future episodes of The Circ Desk, Yaika and I will be mentioning that again because we can’t always, and there are some authors and some titles where a read-alike is obvious. You have a plot that is very similar, especially in psychological suspense and mysteries and romances. We do use some of the same story elements over and over again, and that’s what readers come to know and enjoy, but I love this challenge of finding read-alikes for more unique books, where you have to think, “Okay, well, what is it that’s appealing to this reader? What is it about this? I can’t find another book where a guy takes on a yearlong task.” I mean, I actually think there are other books, but they’re all written by A. J. Jacobs, so we can’t really do those. Like, that’s not really a read-alike if you’re just handing over the whole author’s set to somebody.

But I find that fascinating that that’s the sort of thing when you can talk to somebody about what they’re looking for. This is where we pull on our readers advisory training to find out, well what’s the appeal here? So, okay, you like the engaging tone of the Jacobs book. You like that it’s a little bit satirical or you like that kind of bend to it. Or maybe you have the next reader who’s like, well, “No, I really loved that it took a slice of American politics. Like I’m looking for more things on politics.” So I think it’s a great reminder to us to not always think, okay, I can’t give out a read-alike unless it’s going to be exactly the same as this other book.

So I think this was a great example of reader’s advisory skill building for that.

Yaika Sabat: Yeah, I do think it’s crucial to remember that, and that’s why, I mean, that’s the whole point of the story elements and appeal in NoveList, is to try and break down those different elements that make up the entire reading experience, because you may have three people who like the same book, and they could like it for entirely different reasons. Sometimes you don’t know until you’re helping that unique reader what they want, and I do think taking the pressure off yourself to find like this identical or perfect match is really important because sometimes it’s just not going to be what it is, but you can still find something the reader’s going to enjoy, and I think that’s the most important part of it.

Rebecca Vnuk: Absolutely. So that’s today’s lesson from The Circ Desk. Thanks so much. We will check you out next time on The Circ Desk.