The following podcast contains explicit language.

I'm Dana Stevens, and this is the Slate Culture Gab Fest. Welcome to Slat-Pluse Edition.

It's Wednesday, January 2nd, 2019. Happy 2019. And on today's show, we're going to do something a little bit different. It's just past the holidays. We're all traveling to different places, and Steve and Julie and I couldn't get back into the studio to tape a regular show. So we thought we would pull back the Slate Plus Velvet Rope this week and share with listeners a selection of some of our favorite Slate Plus segments from the year. Slate Plus is the place where Steve and Julie and I get a little bit looser. I would even say sometimes sillier. We have an extended conversation either about a topic from earlier in the show. Maybe we weren't quite finished making one of our points. Sometimes we bring up another topic entirely. Sometimes we call it at the last minute and say, you know what, as we're walking into the studio, everyone's talking about this. Let's do it. Sometimes we take listener questions from you for the Slate Plus segment, and sometimes we just go with our gut or the trends of the day. From that group of topics, one of the most popular subjects we end up talking about in Slate Plus is books, something we don't actually often cover in the main part of the show. But we have four of our favorite book-themed Slate Plus segments from this year, and our producer has gathered them together into a little beginning of year bouquet for you all until we all get back in the studio together next week. If you like what you hear and you want to get segments like this every week, plus ad-free podcasts, you can, of course, sign up for Slate Plus.

For $35 for your first year, you can help cover the cost of producing the Culture Gab Fest and your other favorite shows and never have to hear an ad again. So if you'd like to support Slate and the Culture Gab Fest, you can go to slate.com slash culture plus and join. Our first Slate Plus segment for today's show comes from this past July, the Grasping at Straws edition of the show, in which Steve, Julia, and I took a listener question about

Steve's often discussed policy that he never sees a movie without having read the book first.

This caused some controversy in studio when he mentioned his policy, and so we decided to

talk about it in

Slate Plus. And here we go. Hello and welcome to the Slat Plus segment of the Slate Culture

Gab Fest. If you are listening to this, that means you're a member of Slate Plus. Thank you so much

for supporting Slate's journalism and our show. Today, we are going to field a smart question, I believe, posed to us by listener Scott Smith.

Allow me to read a little bit from his missive, and then we will engage. Hi, Festies. I just heard Steve claim some kind of hard rule about always reading capital the book before watching capital the movie.

I know he's not alone in this, but this is a pretty problematic policy if you think about it just a minute longer.

Really, I just want to hear Dana and Julia weigh in on this and Steve defend himself or allow nuance to creep in.

But here are the first two points I see against it just to get you

started. One, this rule elevates capital original works and single capital authors over

adaptations and collaborations like movie crews, whereas we can all enjoy the birds or the

counting crows singing you ain't going nowhere without ever sitting through Dylan doing it. We're not

cheating ourselves or Dylan to

enjoy the birds first. Moreover, the essential experience that Graham Parsons or Ridley Scott

want to convey to the audience may be different from the essential experience that Bob Dylan

or Philip K. Dick want to convey. Two, reading and bonding with a novel is likely to diminish

the enjoyment of the movie, as every plot difference or element of the book that is cut from the movie will rankle.

...