In Episode 23 Gen and Jette take on another genre breakdown by asking, “What makes a classic?” It turns out this question is trickier than we thought, but we try to answer it anyway. We take a look at the attributes of uncontested classics and see how they might apply to other books. As always, we have no clear qualifications for what makes a classic, but we seem to know one when we see it. Let us know if you think we nailed it or if you think we have no idea what we’re talking about.
Show Notes
Before he was Sandy Cohen, Peter Gallagher was in NBC mini-series adaptation of Brave New World.
Read more about Copyright & Public Domain rules.
The Chronicles of Narnia always make Jette think of the SNL Digital Short “Lazy Sunday.”
The sad Irish lady that Jette couldn’t remember is Flannery O’Connor who is actually from Georgia, but has a very Irish name.
Apparently Atlas Shrugged is a movie trilogy that’s less than 8 years old.
The Diviners was a CBC mini series. It’s too “modern” to be considered a classic, but it is considered a Canadian classic. (So, it’s a classic, right? We’re rolling our eyes at these arbitrary rules.)
Ray Bradbury died in 2012.
Books and Authors Mentioned
Ernest Hemingway
John Steinbeck
William Faulkner
The Brontƫ Sisters
Flannery O’Connor
Willa Cather
James Joyce
C.S Lewis
Charles Dickens
Ayn Rand
Franz Kafka
Alexandre Dumas
Carol Shields
Margaret Atwood
Michael Crichton
Brave New World (1932) by Aldous Huxley
The Bell Jar (1963) by Sylvia Plath
Farenheit 451 (1953) by Ray Bradbury
Frankenstein (1818) by Mary Shelley
Wuthering Heights (1847) by Emily Brontƫ
War and Peace (1869) by Leo Tolstoy
Crime and Punishment (1866) by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Anna Karenina (1878) by Leo Tolstoy
Lord of the Flies (1954) by William Golding
The Hobbit (1937) and Lord of the Rings (1954) by JRR Tolkien
Peter Pan (1911) by JM Barrie
Alice in Wonderland (1865) by Lewis Carroll
The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) by Oscar Wilde
Sherlock Holmes (1887-1927) by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Goldfinch (2013) by Donna Tartt
The Great Gatsby (1925) by F Scott Fitzgerald
Heart of Darkness (1902) by Joseph Conrad
Lolita (1955) by Valdimir Nabakov
The Stone Angel by Margaret Laurence
Anne of Green Gables by LM Montgomery
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
The Shining (1977) by Stephen King
Good Omens (1990) by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971) by Hunter S Thompson
