This week Marlon and Jake answer some of the questions that listeners have asked. What dead author or book did they initially hate but have come around to love? What is the best book by the worst dead author? And who is the most annoying character by a dead author? (Spoiler alert: Heathcliff. Obviously.) Along the way Jake confesses a lack of enthusiasm for William Faulkner and, yes, Virginia Woolf, while Marlon bemoans the insufferably boring Thomas Hardy and makes a plug for the poetic darkness of Shakespeare’s Richard III. Their shared hatred of A Tale of Two Cities is back and stronger than ever. Will Jake re-read Absalom, Absalom!? Will Marlon let go of his Edith Wharton grudge? Should we take relationship advice from Jane Austen? Was D.H. Lawrence the 20th Century’s bridesmaid but never its bride? Has the “Great Pirate Novel” been written? Tune in to learn the answers to these essential questions and so much more!
Select titles discussed in this episode:
- Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
- The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
- The Nick Adams Stories by Ernest Hemingway
- Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
- Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
- Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy
- The Awakening by Kate Chopin
- Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot
- Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
- The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
- Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence
- Emma by Jane Austen
- Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
- Persuasion by Jane Austen
- A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams
- Harvey by Mary Chase
- Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
- The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
- QB VII by Leon Uris
- Airport by Arthur Hailey
- The White Witch of Rosehall by Herbert G. de Lisser
- The Black Sun by Lance Horner
- Richard III by William Shakespeare
- The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare
- Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare
- Pericles by William Shakespeare
- The Merry Wives of Windsor by William Shakespeare
- Cymbeline by William Shakespeare
- One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
- The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
- Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
- Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
- A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes
- This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
- Bleak House by Charles Dickens
- Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
- David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
- The Edwardians by Vita Sackville-West
- Stoner by John Williams
- The Pearl by John Steinbeck
- The Ambassadors by Henry James
- Autumn of the Patriarch by Gabriel García Márquez
- Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
- Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
