Marlon and Jake Read Dead People

In the final episode of the season, Marlon and Jake weigh in on their favorite vacation reads, including the ones they started but never finished. Tune in to find out which classic novels Jake took to the beach and which ones Marlon says should have been thrown in the ocean. 
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The Goodbye Look by Ross McDonald
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
Chances by Jackie Collins
The Year of the French by Thomas Flanagan
All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
The Golden Bowl by Henry James
The Ambassadors by Henry James
Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
Pronto by Elmore Leonard
Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones
Smallbone Deceased by Michael Gilbert
The Mystery of the Stuttering Parrot by Robert Arthur, Jr.
Persuasion by Jane Austen

It was the best of times; it was the worst of times—it was school. In this episode, Marlon and Jake discuss books where school is the setting or going to school is central to the plot. They debate which authors got school right and which got school wrong, what makes an inspiring teacher, and what the closed universe of a schoolyard or college campus can feel like. Tune in to hear Marlon and Jake reminisce over their own college experiences and what they were like as students.
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Tom Brown’s School Days by Thomas Hughes
The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling by Henry Fielding
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh
Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh
Scoop by Evelyn Waugh
The Crime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
A Separate Peace by John Knowles
Look back in Anger by John Osborne
Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy
Absalom, Absalom! By William Faulkner
Love Story by Erich Segal
The Miracle Worker by William Gibson
Stoner by John Williams
Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm
The Corn is Green by Emlyn Williams

In this episode, Marlon and Jake talk about cities in books. Books set in memorable cities, books set in cities you're glad you've never been to and books where the city itself is nearly a character. They talk about the specificity of London of the 19th century British novel, the New York novel, entirely fictional cities in Sci-Fi and Fantasy, and don’t miss Marlon’s personal experience with Bloomsday in Dublin!
Subscribe to our River-herd newsletter for sneak peeks of our upcoming books, free giveaways, and exclusive content. https://sites.prh.com/riverhead-reader-newsletterUlysses by James Joyce 
Ulysses by James Joyce
Portrait of the Artist by James Joyce
Dubliners by James Joyce
The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe 
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe
The Age of Innocence Edith Wharton 
The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
Palace Walk by Naguib Mahfouz
Palace of Desire by Naguib Mahfouz
Sugar Street by Naguib Mahfouz
Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino 
Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Doblin
In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust 
The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo
Interview with a Vampire by Anne Rice 
Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
The Young Unicorns by Madeleine L’Engle

In this episode, Marlon and Jake talk about the bad characters we’re not meant to like but do and the good characters we’re meant to like but annoy us. From Dracula to Daisy Buchanan to Oliver Twist and Bambi, the good-to-evil spectrum is vast and no character is safe from commentary. Tune in to find out which classic villain the duo unanimously hate, and which villain gives Marlon the chills and scares Jake to this day. 
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The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith
A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams
The Flashman series by George MacDonald Fraser
Tom Brown’s School Days by Thomas Hughes
King Solomon’s Mines by Sir H. Rider Haggard
Raiders of the Lost Arc by Campbell Black
Dracula by Bram Stoker
Frankenstein by Mary Shelly
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
East of Eden by John Steinbeck
The Awakening by Kate Chopin
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Good Morning Midnight by Jean Rhys
Bambi by Felix Salten
Watership Down by Richard Adams
Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
Middlemarch by George Eliot
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
The Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Railway Children by E. Nesbit
Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie
The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling
Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
Emma by Jane Austen
Mansfield Park by Jane Austen

This episode, Marlon and Jake discuss a new subject for the podcast: poetry! From epic poems to sonnets to the Romantics poets to contemporary (dead) poets. They ponder over why people don’t read poetry as much as prose and recite, on the spot, lines of poetry that are forever engrained in their memories.
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The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser
War Music by Christopher Logue
The Gift Outright by Robert Frost
Emily Dickinson
W.H. Auden
T.S. Eliot
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
William Wordsworth
Rupert Brooke
John Dunn
The Spanish Needle by Claude McKay
The Iliad by Homer
The Aeneid by Virgil
Omeros by Derek Walcott
The Arrivants by Kamau Brathwaite
Riddyn Ravings (The Mad Woman's Poem) by Jean “Binta” Breeze
Anne Sexton
Dr. Maya Angelou
The Tyger by William Blake
Fire and Ice by Robert Frost
Gwendolyn Brooks
June Jordan
Audre Lorde
Toni Morrison
Ogden Nash
Dorothy Parker
Tales From Ovid by Ted Hughes
Inferno from Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri