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
