from the eternal city Rome. This is obscure season three. Wuthering Heights, I am your host

your friend, your ear lover, your literary mansplainer in chief and Georgianologist Michael

Pazan. This is the final episode of season three. We have concluded the book and I thought

it might be wise to try to sum up my thoughts on Wuthering Heights. I didn't do this for

the other books, but Wuthering Heights is a little more complicated for me because, as

I have said repeatedly, throughout the reading of the novel, this great great American

novel, I don't know what it's about. And that was somewhat frustrating for me as I plotted

along through the book, which I enjoyed, by the way. I think Wuthering Heights is a enjoyable

read. Would recommend. Now, maybe you think, oh Michael, you are a buffoon, Wuthering Heights

is widely considered to be a classic, and yet you recommend yes. That's right, because

whether or not something is considered a classic is a little bit beyond the point. And outside

the scope of this podcast, when we say we're going to read works of classic literature out loud and

comment on them as we go, that is pulling from the Western canon, widely acknowledged classics

that I have no desire to read, reading them and making my own informed opinion about them.

That's why I can recommend Jude the Obscure and Wuthering Heights. I cannot recommend Frankenstein,

which is a bore. Wuthering Heights is not a bore. Wuthering Heights is an interesting novel,

certainly, by today's standards. It's a kind of fun thing to go through these older novels,

and see how the novel itself, as a form, is figuring itself out. With Wuthering Heights,

you still have that strange convention of the first person narrator, relaying a story often

told in a second character's voice. It is a strange convention, and I suspect an early

convention of the novel, which fortunately was dropped by the time Thomas Hardy came along.

That would have been intolerable. But onto the book itself, it's really more like two books,

...