Wednesday 23 May 2012

Book Lovers' Quiz - May 2012

I regularly team up with fellow blogger and all round bibliophilic good egg Norfolk Bookworm to host a book quiz at the Norfolk and Norwich Millennium Library.

For those who can't be there, those who just like testing their quizzing acumen, and those wanting to test the water before booking, here are the questions. (Answers are in white below the question: highlight the - apparently - blank space to see them) 

Enjoy! And good luck.
Norfolk and Norwich Millennium Library
Tuesday 22nd May 2012

Round 1: Cats and Dogs

1) Montmorency accompanied who?
A: Three Men in a Boat

2) Cujo is a St Bernard dog featuring in the eponymous novel by which American author?
A: Stephen King

3) Koko and Yum-Yum are famous crime solving cats created by which crime author?
A: Lillian Jackson Braun

4) What is Odysseus’s faithful dog called?
A: Argos

5) Stelmaria, the snow leopard, is who’s deamon in Philip Pullman’s The
Northern Lights?
A: Lord Asriel

6) Who owns Greebo in the books by Terry Pratchett?
A: Nanny Ogg

7) What breed of dog was John Steinbeck’s canine companion in Travels with Charley?
A: French Poodle

8) What did Lord Bryon do when told, as a student, that he was not permitted to keep a dog whilst at Cambridge?
A: Kept a bear.

9) In Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland what is Alice’s kitten called?
A: Dinah

10) A library in Iowa adopted a stray cat who became a favourite with the customers, what appropriate name was he given?
A: Dewey

 
Round 2: Devouring Books: Beer and Bread (and other Drinks)
1.      In George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, how is the nightmare totalitarian future reflected in the way beer is served
A: It’s served in litres and half-litres. Orwell was fiercely opposed to the metric system.

2.      What do Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect drink before escaping Earth on a Vogon demolition ship in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy?
A: Ale/Beer

3.      What is the name of the bread that Galadrial gives the Fellowship in The Lord of the Rings? Shaped into thin cakes, it is very nutritious, stays fresh for months when kept unbroken in its original leaf-wrappings, and is used for sustenance on long journeys.
A: Lembas Bread

4.      Who wrote The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy?
A: Laurence Sterne

5.      According to his own doctor, which French novelist, author of Le Pere Goriot and Le Cousin Pons, died of caffeine poisoning?
A: Honore de Balzac. Balzac drank coffee endlessly to fight what he saw as the pointless waste of time represented by sleep. As a result, he wrong ninety-one novels in his Comedie humaine series in just twenty years – and died at fifty-one

6.      What’s the connection between coffee and Captain Ahab’s first mate in Moby Dick?
A: Captain Ahab’s first mate is Starbuck – after whom the coffee chain is named, because the founders are fans of Melville’s novel.

7.      Which world dominating drinks brand inspired Mark Thomas’s book Belching Out the Devil
A: Coca Cola

8.       Who is the author of 2011 Orange Prize for Fiction winning The Tiger’s Wife?
A: Tea Obreht

9.      Persistently shortlisted for the Booker; yet to win. Author of The Little Stranger and The Night Watch
A: Sarah Waters

10.  What is the name of John Dos Passos’s 1925 novel that focuses on the development of urban life in New York City from the Gilded Age to the Jazz Age as told through a series of overlapping individual stories.
A: Manhattan Transfer

Round 3: A Right Royal Do
 1 - Who greet the Queen with the words “Oh, Ruler of Straight Lines!”
A: The Big Friendly Giant

2 – Which political party are elected in Sue Townsend’s The Queen and I that capitulates them into poverty and a house on a council estate?
A: The Republican Party

3 – In  which book does the Queen discover a love for literature, and a dislike for Ian McEwan, thanks to a mobile library?
A: The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett

4 – “She reminds me of the wind-up Chinese doll that Uncle Ted has brought Patricia back from Hong Kong – both glide over the carpet without revealing their feet and wear an expression of grave serenity.” The Queen is described at her 1953 coronation in which novel?
A: Kate Atkinson’s Behind the Scenes at the Museum

5 – Where does the Queen disappear to, renaming herself Gloria Smith, in Emma Tennant’s novel The Autobiography of the Queen?
A: St Lucia

6 – “Now that we crown her as our queen / May love keep all her pathways green. / May sunlight bless her days; / May the fair spring of her beginning / Ripen to all things worth the winning.” Which poet laureate penned these lines on the Queen’s coronation?
A: John Masefield

7 – Which author did the Queen describe as "exceedingly good" when she met her new poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy?
A: Rudyard Kipling

8 – Which Englishman, and politician, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953?
A: Winston Churchill

9 – Which long running play, written by Agatha Christie had its premier in 1952?
A: The Moustrap

10 – Which historical fiction author has written books entitled: The White Queen and The Red Queen?
A: Philippa Gregory


Round 4: Second Childhood

1.      Which children’s author was a news correspondent during the Russian Revolution and went on to marry Trotsky’s secretary?
A: Arthur Ransome

2.      Which Canadian Province is home to Anne of Green Gables?
A: Prince Edward Island

3.      What children’s writer’s name was given to asteroid 43844 in 2006?
A: JK Rowling

4.      What kind of house do Hunca Munca and Tom Thumb vandalise in Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Two Bad Mice?
A: A Doll’s House

5.      What do the boys use to start a signal fire in Lord of the Flies?
A: Piggy’s glasses

6.      Which children’s author wrote screen play drafts for the films You Only Live Twice and Chitty, Chitty, Bang, Bang?
A: Roald Dahl

7.      In Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Charlie finds the last golden ticket – who finds the first one?
A: Augustus Gloop

8.      Who leads Mary Lennox to the key to the garden in Francess Hodgson Burnett’s Secret Garden?
A: The Robin

9.      Where does the original Winnie the Pooh, presented to Christopher Robin on his birthday in 1921, currently reside?
A: New York Public Library

10.  Dr Seuss wrote Green Eggs and Ham in response to a bet. What was it?
a)      That he couldn’t write a book in less than a day
b)     To persuade his young daughter, a fussy eater, to try new foods
c)      That there wasn’t a rhyme for ‘oranges’
d)     That he couldn’t write a book using 50 words of fewer
A: d)



 
Table Round 1  (total of 20 points; 2 points per question)

The VS Naipaul Test

In an interview at the Royal Geographic Society in 2011, VS Naipaul provoked fury by suggesting that women writers are 'sentimental' and 'unequal to me', he also claimed that 'I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not.'

For one point, can you identify whether the following paragraphs were written by a man or a woman? For a second point, can you identify who the author is?


1.
The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.
A: Male (A Bend in the River by VS Naipaul)

2.
Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.
A: Female (Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf)

3.
I am by birth a Genevese, and my family is one of the most distinguished of that republic. My ancestors had been for many years counsellors and syndics, and my father had filled several public situations with honour and reputation. He was respected by all who knew him for his integrity and indefatigable attention to public business. He passed his younger days perpetually occupied by the affairs of his country; a variety of circumstances had prevented his marrying early, nor was it until the decline of life that he became a husband and the father of a family.
A: Female (Frankenstein by Mary Shelley)

4.
Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.
A: Male (Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence)

5.
Dark spruce forest frowned on either side the frozen waterway. The trees had been stripped by a recent wind of their white covering of frost, and they seemed to lean toward each other, black and ominous, in the fading light. A vast silence reigned over the land. The land itself was a desolation, lifeless, without movement, so lone and cold that the spirit of it was not even that of sadness. There was a hint in it of laughter, but of a laughter more terrible than any sadness - a laughter that was mirthless as the smile of the Sphinx, a laughter cold as the frost and partaking of the grimness of infallibility. It was the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the futility of life and the effort of life. It was the Wild, the savage, frozenhearted Northland Wild.
A: Male (White Fang by Jack London)

6.
Sir Walter Elliot, of Kellynch Hall, in Somersetshire, was a man who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but the Baronetage; there he found occupation for an idle hour, and consolation in a distressed one; there his faculties were roused into admiration and respect, by contemplating the limited remnant of the earliest patents; there any unwelcome sensations, arising from domestic affairs changed naturally into pity and contempt as he turned over the almost endless creations of the last century; and there, if every other leaf were powerless, he could read his own history with an interest which never failed.
A: Female (Persuasion by Jane Austen)

7.

A: Female (The Handmaids’s Tale by Margaret Atwood)

8.
The play - for which Briony had designed the posters, programmes and tickets, constructed the sales booth out of a folding screen tipped on its side, and lined the collection box in red crepe paper - was written by her in a two-day tempest of composition, causing her to miss a breakfast and a lunch.
A: Male (Atonement by Ian McEwan)

9.
Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress. Her hand and wrist were so finely formed that she could wear sleeves not less bare of style than those in which the Blessed Virgin appeared to Italian painters; and her profile as well as her stature and bearing seemed to gain the more dignity from her plain garments, which by the side of provincial fashion gave her the impressiveness of a fine quotation from the Bible, - or from one of our elder poets, - in a paragraph of to-day's newspaper. She was usually spoken of as being remarkably clever, but with the addition that her sister Celia had more common-sense.
A: Female (Middlemarch by George Elliot)

10.
The first place that I can well remember was a large pleasant meadow with a pond of clear water in it. Some shady trees leaned over it, and rushes and water-lilies grew at the deep end. Over the hedge on one side we looked into a plowed field, and on the other we looked over a gate at our master's house, which stood by the roadside; at the top of the meadow was a grove of fir trees, and at the bottom a running brook overhung by a steep bank.
A: Female (Black Beauty by Anna Sewell)


 
Table Round 2 (total of 20 points; 1 point per question)

Connections

Can you find what links the following literary people or things?
(1 point for each correct link)

Example
            “Every child in our world will know his name.”
            The author famous for Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn
            Author of the No. 1 Ladies Detective agency books
            Former Doctor Who actor who also Kicked Pigs.
Connection: Professions
(Harry Potter, Henry Miller, Alexander McCall Smith, Tom Baker)

1.         Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy are evacuated to the house of an old professor.
            William Blake’s ‘fearful symmetry’.
Don Fabrizio Prince of Salina, in a 1958 novel set in Sicily around a hundred years earlier.
The autobiography of a Hollywood chimp.
A: Big Cats (The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, Tyger, The Leopard, Me Cheeta)

2.         Henry Williamson’s bestselling otter and the author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (spelled slightly differently)
            The author of Interview with the Vampire.
            A Tory politicians Parliamentary Affair.
The cause of great uncertainty and the first sign of trouble at Krishnapur in JG Farrell’s The Seige of Krishnapur
A: Indian Food (Tarka the Otter and Roald Dahl, Anne Rice, Edwina Currie, Chapatis)

3.         Walter Scott’s most famous novel
            Adrian Henri, Roger McGough and Brian Patten
            A bear from Peru
            A song by ABBA (oh, and also the 22nd of Sharpe’s adventures)
A: Train stations (Waverley, The Liverpool Poets, Paddington Bear, Waterloo...and Sharpe’s Waterloo)

4.         A family affair, this book was written by father, Johann Wyss, and edited and illustrated by his two sons.
            A John Fowles novel of 1969
The sonnet sequence that contains the poem beginning: ‘How do I love thee? Let me count the ways’
Michael Ondaatje wins the 1992 Booker Prize
A: European Nationalities (Swiss Family Robinson, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Sonnets From the Portuguese, The English Patient)

5.         Alex and his droogs speaking Nadsat
The Joad family flee the Oklahoma dustbowl of the 1930s
A Series of Unfortunate Events
Not the only fruit
A: Fruit (A Clockwork Orange, The Grapes of Wrath, Lemony Snicket, Oranges are Not the Only Fruit (again))

6.         In 1985 Oliver Sacks has one of the few bestsellers in literary history about neurology.
            Tennyson’s Charge took place here
            Sherlock Holmes is famous for this
            F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Great...
A: Hats/Head Coverings (The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Balaclava in the Crimea, Deerstalker, Gatsby)

7.         The best-known story in Annie Proulx’s Close Range: Wyoming Stories
            Where William Blake’s feet walk in ancient times
            Inman returns from the American Civil War in Charles Frazier’s first novel
            Kazuo Ishiguro’s first novel
A: Mountains/Hills (‘Brokeback Mountain’, ‘And did those feet in ancient time.
Walk upon England's mountains green’, Cold Mountain, A Pale View of the Hills)

8.         ‘The Road Not Taken’ (a poem)
            The man who circled the globe in approximately 115,200 minutes
            Richard Hughes’s novel of Jamaica
            Books by Peter Hoeg, Orhan Pamuk and David Gutterson)
A: Bad weather (Robert Frost, Phileus Fogg, A High Wind in Jamaica, Snow)

9.         Norwich resident and former Richard and Judy author of The Memory Garden, The Dream House, and The Glass Painters Daughter)
            Holden Caulfield’s sister in The Catcher in the Rye
            Philip Larkin’s Letters to...
            _______ and Wilson’s Anatomy and Physiology
A: Characters from the sitcom Friends (Rachel Hore, Pheobe, Monica, Ross)

10.       (professionally speaking)
            Mao Tse-tung
            Giacomo Casanova
            Philip Larkin
            Jorge Luis Borges
A: They were all librarians

11.       The author of Stig of the Dump
            Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s most famous creation
            Meg Cabot’s series of books for children
            The Hans Christian Anderson story in which Gerda rescues Kay
A: Members of the Nuclear Royal Family (Clive King, The Little Prince, The Princess Diaries, The Snow Queen)

12.       John Updike’s Harry Angstrom
            Richard Adams
            Mr McGregor’s enemy
            Margery Williams makes it real
A: Rabbits (Rabbit novels, Watership Down, Peter Rabbit survives a hair raising chase after raiding Mr McGregor’s vegetables in The Tale of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter, The Velvetine Rabbit)

13.       Julian of Norwich
            Thomas de Quincey
            King James
            GK Chesterton’s Brown     
A: Religion (Revelations of Diving Love, Confessions of an English Opium Eater, The Bible, Father Brown)

14.       Laurie Lee’s 1969 follow-up to Cider with Rosie
            Arthur Koestler’s 1940 attack on Stalinism
            Ernest Hemingway’s 1932 celebration of bullfighting
            Mark Haddon’s bestselling novel, narrated by a child with autism
A: Times of day (As I Walked out One Midsummer Morning, Darkness at Noon, Death in the Afternoon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time)

15.       Author of The Wasp Factory
            V for Vendetta and Watchmen
            Scottish chef with a penchant for swearing
            1970s magazine for girls and the author of the author of My Manchester United Years
A: Members of the 1966 World Cup Winning England football squad (Iain Banks, Alan Moore, Gordon Ramsey, Jackie & Bobby Charlton)

16.       One Day by David Nichols
            Ulysees by James Joyce
            Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
            Saturday by Ian McEwan
A: The action in each of these takes place on one day - in the case of One Day, this is the same day each year. (15th July, 16th June 1904,  we never know what the date is, Saturday 15th Feb, 2003)

17.       SJ Watson’s debut
A picture book by Adam Mansbach and Ricardo Cortes that was subsequently narrated by Samuel L Jackson and became an internet sensation
World War two evacuation feel-good by Michelle Magorian
Raymond Chandler’s crime noir epic
A: Going to Sleep (Before I Go to Sleep, Go the F**k to Sleep, Goodnight Mr Tom, and The Big Sleep)

18.       Graphic Novel (and television series) created by Tony Moore and Robert Kirkman
            What Haruki Murakami is talking about
            Erica Jong’s Fear
            Most of what happens in On The Road
A: Modes of transport (The Walking Dead, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, Fear of Flying, Driving)

19.       Nathaniel Hawthorne’s A
            Margaret Attwood’s hoods
            Michel Faber’s epic novel about a prostitute
            Restoration (another Norwich connection)
A: Colours (The Scarlet Letter, Red – from The Handmaid’s Tale, The Crimson Petal and the White, Rose Tremain)

20.       Little pigs; Goldilocks and the bears; blind mice
            Luigi Pirandello’s characters
            According to Michael Morpurgo, how many lives does Montezuma the cat have?
The Shakespeare play that’s subtitled What You Will (and the play Shakespeare writes following the queen’s advice in Shakespeare in Love)
A: The 3 times table (Three Men in a Boat, Six Characters in Search of a Plot, The Nine Lives of Montezuma, Twelfth Night)

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