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