The Year of Living Constitutionally by A. J. Jacobs - Summer Reading Spectacular!
Circulating Ideas 264
One of my goals for the Summer Reading Spectacular was to feature as many different genres as I could, and that included having at least one nonfiction (non-fiction? non fiction?) title — and yes, at the end of the summer, you’ll see that I still missed a bunch of genres! When I saw that one of my favorite nonfiction writers, A. J. Jacobs had a new book coming out and bonus, it was about American history, which is also a favorite topic of mine, ding ding ding, we had a winner!
I imagine A. J.’s immersive experiments would be a pain to be a part of, but they sure are fun to read about. I think I gave a copy of The Know-It-All to almost everyone I know, and I SHOULD give The Puzzler to those same people!
Check out my interview with A. J. Jacobs now, either as a podcast or the transcript!
A.J. Jacobs learned the hard way that donning a tricorne hat and marching around Manhattan with a 1700s musket will earn you a lot of strange looks. In the wake of several controversial rulings by the Supreme Court and the on-going debate about how the Constitution should be interpreted, Jacobs set out to understand what it means to live by the Constitution.
In The Year of Living Constitutionally, A.J. Jacobs tries to get inside the minds of the Founding Fathers by living as closely as possible to the original meaning of the Constitution. He asserts his right to free speech by writing his opinions on parchment with a quill and handing them out to strangers in Times Square. He consents to quartering a soldier, as is his Third Amendment right. He turns his home into a traditional 1790s household by lighting candles instead of using electricity, boiling mutton, and—because women were not allowed to sign contracts— feebly attempting to take over his wife’s day job, which involves a lot of contract negotiations.
The book blends unforgettable adventures—delivering a handwritten petition to Congress, applying for a Letter of Marque to become a legal pirate for the government, and battling redcoats as part of a Revolutionary War reenactment group—with dozens of interviews from constitutional experts from both sides. Jacobs dives deep into originalism and living constitutionalism, the two rival ways of interpreting the document.
Much like he did with the Bible in The Year of Living Biblically, Jacobs provides a crash course on our Constitution as he experiences the benefits and perils of living like it’s the 1790s. He relishes, for instance, the slow thinking of the era, free from social media alerts. But also discovers the progress we’ve made since 1789 when married women couldn’t own property.
Now more than ever, Americans need to understand the meaning and value of the Constitution. As politicians and Supreme Court Justices wage a high-stakes battle over how literally we should interpret the Constitution, A.J. Jacobs provides an entertaining yet illuminating look into how this storied document fits into our democracy today.
Summer Reading List
Each episode of the Summer Reading Spectacular offers the authors an opportunity to add a book(s) to the Circulating Ideas Summer Reading List! I’ll update the list with each episode until we have our complete list at the end of the summer!
The Steerswoman (Cory Doctorow’s pick)
How to Solve Murders Like a Lady; Children of Anguish and Anarchy; Georgette Heyer; Saara El-Arifi; the Daevabad Trilogy (City of Brass, Kingdom of Copper, Empire of Gold) (Amita Murray’s picks)
How the Word Is Passed (Kirsten Miller’s pick)
James Madison's Notes on the Debates in the Federal Convention, May 25, 1787 (A. J. Jacob’s pick)
Ready Reference
Mentioned on the podcast:
“The Constitution of the United States: is it pro-slavery or anti-slavery?”, Frederick Douglass
“Garrison's Constitution: The Covenant with Death and How It Was Made”
The Circ Desk
Time for another shift on The Circ Desk from Rebecca Vnuk from Library Reads and Yaika Sabat from NoveList! This week, they discuss narrative nonfiction and the difficulty of doing readers’ advisory for nonfiction.
The Circ Desk recommends:
Steve Thomas is a public library manager who lives in the suburbs of Atlanta with his wife, two kids, and one dog. He has worked in libraries since the year 2000 and has hosted the Circulating Ideas podcast since 2011. He really likes Coke Zero.
Currently Reading: Triptych by Karin Slaughter