This week we break things down to the quark level to bring you mythical love stories (featuring a king named Mark), ghost-written historical romances, interminable sentences, and Joycean numerology. Jackie Mahoney joins the team and expertly weaves their way through questions of whether chapter 2.4 is about Tristan and Isolde, or if it's more about about the four perverts leering at them from the dock, and we finish up with a rousing consideration of Joyce as Beyoncé, the author as God, squelchy onomatopoeia, and, inevitably, the music of Evanescence.

Trigger warning: descriptions of bodily noises.

(Apologies for the sound quality on Toby's mic, it's an ongoing problem that will be fixed)

This week's readers: Jackie Mahoney, TJ Young, Toby Malone

Progress: 399 pages complete, 229 pages to go; 63.54% read.

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