Secret Life of Books

What makes a trip down the Mississippi river so famous - and so notorious? Why did it need to be rewritten in the 2024 novel James by Percival Everett? Is Huck Finn the most famous character in world literature? We’ve gone on record saying that The Great Gatsby is #1 Great American Novel - but this week we may have to eat our words. Is it actually The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the book Mark Twain published in 1884 but set in America before the civil war. Released on the day of the Harris-Trump Presidential election, this episode is all about why Huck Finn remains what it has always been, a novel of division. Sophie and Jonty talk about why Huck Finn is a novel of divisions and polarizations. A novel for our times. The divisions are between North and South, between slave states and free, between confederates and unionists, between white and Black, between enslaved and emancipated. These are just some of the tensions that Twain took on and even though it’s nearly 150 years old, its themes and ideas are more relevant than ever. But is this book now racist to be readable? Or is it a vision of what America really is, a wake-up call that we must pay attention to? -- To join the Secret Life of Books Club visit: www.secretlifeofbooks.org-- The Secret Life of Books invites listeners to join The Conversation, a chance to interact directly with Sophie and Jonty about episode content and to make the case for books we should cover: https://www.secretlifeofbooks.org/forumX: @SLOBpodcast@sophieggee@ClaypoleJontyinsta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/Further Reading:Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, (Norton Critical Edition, 4th Edition, 2021)Jerome Loving, Mark Twain: The Adventures of Samuel L. Clemens (University of California Press, 2010)William Dean Howells,  My Mark Twain (Dover, 1997, reprint of 1910 edition)Rachel Cohen, A Chance Meeting, ( NYRB reprints, 2024)Richard White, The Republic for Which It Stands - The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896 (Oxford, 2017)There’s a great forthcoming biography of Mark Twain by the celebrated Ron Chernow, publishing May 2025.Percival Everett, James (Doubleday 2024)

Ever wonder what Shakespeare got up to in the bedroom? Well, whether you do or not, you’ll find out - along with many other things - in this episode devoted to Maggie O’Farrell’s superb novel Hamnet (spoiler alert: it involves a shed, a kestrel and shelves of bouncing apples, rather than an actual bedroom). Hamnet was published to critical acclaim in 2020. It brings Shakespeare’s wife - Anne Hathaway (called Agnes in this telling) - out of the shadows, recounting her relationship with a Latin tutor who has an urge to write, the fraught birth of their children, the death of their son Hamnet, the impact this tragedy has on their marriage and, finally, how all this informed the creation of said Latin Tutor’s masterpiece. A play titled - you guessed it - Hamlet. Most daringly of all, O’Farrell gives Anne/Agnes supernatural powers and suggests that Shakespeare’s meanness in leaving her only his second best bed in his will was in fact an affectionate reminder of the sexy time they had together in said bed. Sophie and Jonty talk about the long road that brought O’Farrell to this story; the difficulty of bringing historical characters to life; the unique light that O’Farrell’s novel casts on the creation of a literary landmark; and finally ask:does this book about the making of a classic have the potential to become one? Jonty also confronts Sophie about the sex scenes in her 2007 novel Scandal of the Season, implying a certain gratuitousness, but Sophie ably defends herself on purely intellectual grounds.Visit the Secret Life of Books and join a conversation about the episode and the show: https://www.secretlifeofbooks.org/forumFurther reading: Maggie O’Farrell, Hamnet (Tinder Press, 2020) Maggie O’Farrell, I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes With Death (Tinder Press, 2018) James Shapiro, A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599 (Harper Collins, 2005)Stephen Greenblatt, Will In The World (WW Norton, 2004)Sophie Gee, Scandal of the Season (Chatto & Windus, 2007)

Hamlet is jammed with famous quotes like “to be or not to be,” “something is rotten in the state of Denmark,” “time is out of joint,” “the play’s the thing,” “get thee to a nunnery,” and “the rest is silence.” But who really knows what happens in the world’s most famous play? And why is it so damn long? Jonty confides the intense boredom induced by the unabridged 5.5 hour Kenneth Branagh marathon Hamlet during the 90s.Jonty and Sophie are in heated agreement that Hamlet is not a nice guy but a bit of an over privileged brat. The Ghost, not Hamlet, gets SLOB’s prize this week for MVP. not to mention lovely Ophelia, the play’s most moving and sympathetic character.  There many unanswered questions in Hamlet and Sophie argues that “to be or not to be?” isn’t even in the Top 10. And also, why do actors speak so slowly when delivering the “to be or not to be” speech? Jonty - at last - concedes that the Protestant Reformation is at the heart of this text! Plus we get a quick primer on political and religious life under Queen Elizabeth I, who was in crisis with a threatened rebellion from the Earl of Essex. The queen wasn’t the only one in a career slump in the late 1590s - Shakespeare was having problems with his work-life balance  too. Why — and how — did he and his business partners dismantle their theater and carry it across the Thames one frosty December night in 1598? Hear why Shakespeare played the Ghost in the first performances of Hamlet, and how this very adult play is also about the death of Shakespeare’s 11 year old son named Hamnet, a few years earlier. Visit the Secret Life of Books and join a conversation about the episode and the show: https://www.secretlifeofbooks.org/forumFurther Reading:William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Folger Shakespeare Library edition. https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/hamlet/read/James Shapiro, A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599 (Harper Collins, 2005)Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton UP, 2014)Rhodri Lewis, Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness (Princeton UP, 2017)T. S. Eliot, “Hamlet  and His Problems.” In The Sacred Wood (Dover Publications, reprint edition 1997).

“The course of true love never did run smooth.” It certainly did not in Shakespeare’s psychedelic fantasy about cross-dressing, polyamory, speaking truth to power and tik-tok – centuries before the internet. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is endlessly adapted and readapted. At its heart, it’s a play about the madness and thrill of attraction and love; about how strange it is when one human spots another human to spend their life with. In this episode there are green fairies who fight and turn flowers into love-potions. Is falling in love always this random and inexplicable? But the really big question is: are the faeries Incredible Hulk Green, or Fungus the Bogeyman Green? Help us decide. Will you side with Jonty that the “Rude Mechanicals” are hilarious and the young lovers are a tedious bore – or do you agree with Sophie that Bottom, Snug and Flute are unfunny and that Hermia and Helena are internet influencers before their time? A queen falls in love with a donkey, and the Duke of Athens compares lovers, poets and madmen. Join the SLOB team in a moonlit Athenian wood for love and laughs, and a moment of nostalgia for Robert Sean Leonard as Puck in the 1980s hit film Dead Poets’ Society. Visit the Secret Life of Books and join a conversation about the episode and the show: https://www.secretlifeofbooks.org/forumFurther Reading:William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, “The New Cambridge Shakespeare.” (2003). Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World, (Norton, 2004).Jonathan Bate, How the Classics Made Shakespeare, Princeton University Press, 2019.Leonard Barkan, Reading Shakespeare, Reading Me, (Fordham UP, 2024)Bart van Es, “Captive children: John Lyly, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and child impressment on the early modern stage,” Renaissance Studies, 33;2, 2019.