Hope Jahren Expands on Mark Twain

The Book Case

ABC News

Fiction, Arts, Books, Society & Culture

4.1 • 766 Ratings

🗓️ 18 July 2024

⏱️ 37 minutes

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Summary

Every so often, a new author tackles the work of expanding a classic novel to expand its reach. Even more rarely, they succeed beautifully. This week’s book, Adventures of Mary Jane is just such a rare gem. Mary Jane's author, Hope Jahren, is a scientist (a geochemist, no less) who decided to write the story of Mary Jane, a character that haunted her from the pages of Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn her entire life. It is both a magical adventure story and an authentic and well written coming of age drama. This week’s bookstore is Where the Sidewalk Ends, which is also run by two generations in tandem. We talk to them about how they do it…and we commiserate on working with daughters and parents. Join us. Books mentioned in this week's episode: Adventures of Mary Jane by Hope Jahren Lab Girl by Hope Jahren The Story of More: How We Got to Climate Change and Where to Go from Here by Hope Jahren The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe Les Misérables by Victor Hugo Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens A Man without a Country by Kurt Vonnegut Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein Good Night, Irene by Luis Alberto Urrea Elephant Company: The Inspiring Story of an Unlikely Hero and the Animals that Helped him Save Lives in World War II by Vicki Constantine Croke The Lost Boy of Santa Chionia by Juliet Grames-RELEASES 7/23/2024 More or Less Maddy by Lisa Genova-RELEASES 1/14/2025 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, bookcasers, happy Thursday to you. We're about halfway through the summer. We hope you're
0:10.6	having a wonderful, wonderful summer. I am Kate. I am one half of the bookcase team. And I'm
0:15.9	Charlie Gibson. I'm the adjunct host for the bookcase with Kate and Charlie. We have a really interesting book for you this
0:23.9	week and a fascinating author. Her name is Hope Jaron, and she has written a book called Adventures of Mary
0:30.7	Jane. It's not about marijuana. It is about Mary Jane, who was, to the extent that there is a love
0:37.0	interest in Huckleberry Finn,
0:38.9	his love interest. She only appears in 30 pages. But Hope Jaron is a scientist, and she approached
0:45.8	writing Mary Jane's story like a scientist would. It's really interesting the way she went about
0:52.6	it. This novel has stuck in her mind. It has been
0:55.8	something that she reads over and over. And as a scientist, she still wanted to write a good novel
1:01.9	about Mary Jane. And I'm fascinated in the way she went about it. Yeah, she approached it in almost a
1:07.9	culturally anthropological way. And that makes it sound like this book won't be
1:13.5	magical. Somehow she managed to approach the research, the writing of this book with an extremely
1:19.1	sort of scientific perspective. And yet the book still captures the magic and the beauty of
1:24.5	Mark Twain's writing. I mean, this is a woman who was a scientist. And what I love is
1:29.0	she's published papers about her profession. But what I love is, is she decides she's going to
1:34.0	write a book. And so what does she do? She tackles the words of Mark Twain. Huckleberry Finn is a very
1:39.4	important book to her childhood, as you will here. And she writes in the introduction that it bothered her
1:44.9	is that the female characters didn't have a lot of agency in either Tom Sawyer or in Huck Finn.
1:49.8	And with this book, she tried to correct that. Now, that's a very tall order. History has seen a lot
1:54.4	of people who've tried to expand on writer's works, and some of them have failed miserably.
1:59.6	She's a geochemist and a geobiologist, and I don't know what that means either.
	...

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