Tea or Books? #75: Moral Readers or Amoral Readers and The Summer Book vs Birthday Letters

Tove Jansson, Ted Hughes, and fictional morality – welcome to episode 75!   We’re back after a bit of a break – and we’re doing poetry for the first time ever. In the first half of the episode, we discuss

Tove Jansson, Ted Hughes, and fictional morality – welcome to episode 75!

https://www.stuckinabook.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Tea-or-Books-episode-75.mp3

 

We’re back after a bit of a break – and we’re doing poetry for the first time ever. In the first half of the episode, we discuss whether we are moral or amoral readers. Do we have the same morality in our reading as we do in real life? And does the author’s own morality affect our reading?

In the second half, we compare Ted Hughes’ collection of poetry Birthday Letters and Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book. We just about manage to find links!

You can support the podcast at Patreon, email us at teaorbooks[at]gmail.com, find us on iTunes or your podcast app of choice etc. Feel free to get in touch!

I mention a couple of other podcast episodes here – the one where Jenny and Jenny discuss fictional morality is here; my discussion about Jansson with Trevor is here.

The books and authors – and poems! – we mention in this episode are:

A Time to Dance, A Time to Die by John Waller

Dead Man’s Folly by Agatha Christie

The Mirror Crack’d From Side to Side by Agatha Christie

Alfred Tennyson

Hickory Dickory Dock by Agatha Christie

Chronicle of Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The True Deceiver by Tove Jansson

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

Dorothy L Sayers

The Restraint of Beasts by Magnus Mills

All Quiet on the Orient Express by Magnus Mills

The Secret History by Donna Tartt

Frenchman’s Creek by Daphne du Maurier

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber

Hamlet by William Shakespeare

Macbeth by William Shakespeare

Daphne du Maurier by Margaret Forster

Letters From Menabilly by Daphne du Maurier

Oriel Malet

Diary of a Provincial Lady by E.M. Delafield

Mrs Miniver by Jan Struther

Ian McEwan

Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

V.S. Naipaul

Rudyard Kipling

Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor

Angel by Elizabeth Taylor

At Mrs Lippincote’s by Elizabeth Taylor

Mrs Tim of the Regiment by D.E. Stevenson

Excellent Women by Barbara Pym

Jane and Prudence by Barbara Pym

Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons

Some Tame Gazelle by Barbara Pym

Agatha Christie as Mary Westmacott

‘Suttee’ by Ted Hughes

‘Daddy’ by Sylvia Plath

Ariel by Sylvia Plath

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

‘Wuthering Heights’ by Ted Hughes

‘Wuthering Heights’ by Sylvia Plath

‘Chaucer’ by Ted Hughes

Sun City by Tove Jansson

A Winter Book by Tove Jansson

Fair Play by Tove Jansson

Miss Hargreaves by Frank Baker

Miss Boston and Miss Hargreaves by Rachel Malik