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
Thursday 26th July 2012
(Total
of 20 points; 1 point per question)
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis de Bernieres
The Catcher in the Rye by JD Sallinger
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami
Notes from a Small Island by Bill Bryson
The Beach by Alex Garland
The Crow Road by Iain Banks
The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
The Fifth Elephant by Terry Pratchett
The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson
The Long Song by Andrea Levy
The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoot by David Mitchell
The Understudy by David Nicholls
When God Was A Rabbit by Sarah Winman
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
Brideshead Abbreviated: The Digested Read of the Twentieth Century by John Crace
The No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith
The Little Prince by Antoine de St Exuprey
Round 2: The Booker Prize
(Total
of 10 points; 1 point per question)
1. Who won the very first Booker Prize in 1969?
A: PH Newby for Something to Answer For
2. Which author won both the Booker of Bookers in 1993, and the Best of the Booker in 2008.
A: Salman Rushdie for Midnight’s Children
3. In 1971, just two years after it began, the Booker Prize ceased to be awarded retrospectively and became – as it is today – a prize for the best novel of the year of publication. As a result, a wealth of fiction published in 1970 fell through the net and was never eligible. In 2008, The Lost Booker Prize was awarded to the best of these lost books. Who won the Lost Booker Prize for his novel, Troubles?
A: JG Farrell. He had already won once, in 1973, for The Siege of Krishnapur
4. Upon winning the Lost Booker Prize, the author of the answer to question 3 joined two other writers in having won the prize twice. For half a point each, name the other two.
A: J.M. Coetzee and Peter Carey (now, also Hilary Mantel)
5. Which poet judge (best known for ‘Stop All The Clocks’) threatened to jump out of the window if his favoured choice wasn’t awarded the prize?
A: Philip Larkin made the threat if Paul Scott’s Staying On wasn’t selected. It was, and he lived on a little longer. In 1994, judge Rabbi Julia Neuberger, stormed off the panel and declared to the press that the Scottish author Kelman's winning book was "crap".
6. In 2011, the prize was ravaged by controversy over the apparent ‘dumbing down’ of the prizes literary merit. Which doyen of the literary world eventually won the prize for The Sense of an Ending?
A: Julian Barnes
7. Beryl Bainbridge was shortlisted for the Booker Prize 5 times during her career, without ever winning. That was, until the Booker Prize created a special award, The Man Booker Beryl, to judge the best of these shortlisted books. Which of Beryl Bainbridge’s books won?
(Clue: it is set during the Crimean War)
A: Master Georgie. The other shortlisted books were The Dressmaker, The Bottle Factory Outing, An Awfully Big Adventure, and Every Man For Himself
8. The Man Booker International Prize was formed in 2005 to recognise one writer for their achievement in fiction. Like the Nobel Prize, it is awarded for a career, rather than an individual book. It was first won by Albanian novelist and poet Ismail Kadare in 2005, then Chinua Achebe in 2007 and Alice Munro in 2009. Which US writer, author of Portnoy’s Complaint, won in 2011?
A: Philip Roth
9. Who, when he won the Booker Prize for G, immediately stated that he would give half the prize to the Black Panthers?
A: John Berger
10. Which book by unheralded author Yann Martel, which won the prize back in 2002, is the highest selling Booker winner ever, and the only winner to sell more than 1 million copies?
A: The Life of Pi
A: PH Newby for Something to Answer For
2. Which author won both the Booker of Bookers in 1993, and the Best of the Booker in 2008.
A: Salman Rushdie for Midnight’s Children
3. In 1971, just two years after it began, the Booker Prize ceased to be awarded retrospectively and became – as it is today – a prize for the best novel of the year of publication. As a result, a wealth of fiction published in 1970 fell through the net and was never eligible. In 2008, The Lost Booker Prize was awarded to the best of these lost books. Who won the Lost Booker Prize for his novel, Troubles?
A: JG Farrell. He had already won once, in 1973, for The Siege of Krishnapur
4. Upon winning the Lost Booker Prize, the author of the answer to question 3 joined two other writers in having won the prize twice. For half a point each, name the other two.
A: J.M. Coetzee and Peter Carey (now, also Hilary Mantel)
5. Which poet judge (best known for ‘Stop All The Clocks’) threatened to jump out of the window if his favoured choice wasn’t awarded the prize?
A: Philip Larkin made the threat if Paul Scott’s Staying On wasn’t selected. It was, and he lived on a little longer. In 1994, judge Rabbi Julia Neuberger, stormed off the panel and declared to the press that the Scottish author Kelman's winning book was "crap".
6. In 2011, the prize was ravaged by controversy over the apparent ‘dumbing down’ of the prizes literary merit. Which doyen of the literary world eventually won the prize for The Sense of an Ending?
A: Julian Barnes
7. Beryl Bainbridge was shortlisted for the Booker Prize 5 times during her career, without ever winning. That was, until the Booker Prize created a special award, The Man Booker Beryl, to judge the best of these shortlisted books. Which of Beryl Bainbridge’s books won?
(Clue: it is set during the Crimean War)
A: Master Georgie. The other shortlisted books were The Dressmaker, The Bottle Factory Outing, An Awfully Big Adventure, and Every Man For Himself
8. The Man Booker International Prize was formed in 2005 to recognise one writer for their achievement in fiction. Like the Nobel Prize, it is awarded for a career, rather than an individual book. It was first won by Albanian novelist and poet Ismail Kadare in 2005, then Chinua Achebe in 2007 and Alice Munro in 2009. Which US writer, author of Portnoy’s Complaint, won in 2011?
A: Philip Roth
9. Who, when he won the Booker Prize for G, immediately stated that he would give half the prize to the Black Panthers?
A: John Berger
10. Which book by unheralded author Yann Martel, which won the prize back in 2002, is the highest selling Booker winner ever, and the only winner to sell more than 1 million copies?
A: The Life of Pi
Round 3: Literary London
(Total
of 10 points; 1 point per question)
1. The Albert Memorial in London shows Prince Albert holding which book?A: The catalogue to the 1851 Great Exhibition
2. Which 19th century American novelist and poet, author of ‘The Tell Tale Heart’ and ‘The Raven’, spent several years at school in Stoke Newington?
A: Edgar Allan Poe
3. What was the original title of JM Barrie’s Peter Pan?
A: Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens
4. Which crime writer wrote a thriller concerned with the people and places of the London Undergound?
A: Barbara Vine / Ruth Rendell
5. “Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song” From which author did TS Eliot borrow this line for the Waste Land?
A: Edmund Spenser
6. Which London hotel was immortalised in fiction by F Scott Fitzgerald, by comparing the size of a diamond to it?
A: The Ritz
7. Which bear-loving children’s author was so ashamed of his first book ‘Lovers in London’ that he bought back the copyright to avoid it being republished?
A: AA Milne
8. Which former poet laureate is the most recent addition to Westminster Abbey’s Poet’s Corner?
A: Ted Hughes
9. Which author and her husband, at the centre of The Bloomsbury Group, founded the Hogarth Press from their home?
A: Virginia Wolf
10. Which of these celebrated authors is not buried in Highgate Cemetery?
Douglas Adams
Karl Marx
George Eliot (Mary Ann Cross)
Christina Rossetti
A: Charles Dickens
Round 4: ‘After all, tomorrow is another day.’Table Round
(Total of210 points; 1 point per question)
Each of the following is the last line or paragraph of a book. Please name the author and book (1/2 point for each) from which it features.
1. ‘So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.’
A: The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald
2. ‘But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me and I can’t stand it. I been there before.’
A: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
3. ‘He loved Big Brother.’
A: Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
4. ‘It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.’
A: A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
5. ‘The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed sombre under an overcast sky—seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.’
A: The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
6. ‘L--d! said my mother, what is all this story about?——
A COCK and a BULL, said Yorick——And one of the best of its kind I ever heard.’
A: The Life and Opinions of Tristan Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne
7. ‘He was soon borne away by the waves and lost in darkness and distance.’
A: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
8. ‘Are there any questions?’
A: The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Attwood
9. ‘Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.’
A: The Catcher in the Rye by JD Sallinger
10. ‘He is coming, and I am here’
A: The Time Traveller’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
11. ‘I never saw any of them again—except the cops. No way has yet been invented to say goodbye to them.’
A: The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler
12. ‘Thus from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that whilst this planet has gone cycling according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.’
A: The Origin of the Species by Charles Dickens
13. ‘I take his hand, holding tightly, preparing from the cameras, and dreading the moment when I will finally have to let go.’
A: The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
14. ‘But wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on the top of the Forest, a little boy and his Bear will always be playing.’
A: The House at Pooh Corner by A.A. Milne
15. ‘Reader, I married him.’
A: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
16. “There were three thousand six hundred and fifty three days like that in his stretch. From the first clang of the rail to the last clang of the rail. The three extra days were for leap years.”
A: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
17. ‘Upon the demon-ridden pilgrimage of human life, what next I wonder?’
A: The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch
18. ‘And they walked away together through the hole in the wall, back in to the darkness, leaving nothing behind them; not even the doorway.’
A: Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman
19. ‘Lastly, she pictured to herself how this same little sister of hers would, in the after-time, be herself a grown woman; and how she would keep, through all her riper years, the simple and loving heart of her childhood; and how she would gather about her other little children, and make their eyes bright and eager with many a strange tale, perhaps even with the dream of Wonderland of long ago; and how she would feel with all their simple sorrows, and find a pleasure in all their simple joys, remembering her own child-life, and the happy summer days.’
A: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
20. ‘So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars’ll be out, and don’t you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.’
A: On The Road by Jack Kerouac
Round 5: Not the Olympic Games
(Total of 10 points; 1 point per question)
1 – What does the postman always do twice, in the title of the book by James M. Cain?
A: Rings
2 – Naomi Klein’s anti-globalisation and anti corporate book, published in 1999 was entitled what?
A: No Logo
3 – What poem are these lines from?
‘What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.’
What poem is this line from?
A: ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ by Wilfred Owen
4 – What links Trainspotting by Irvine Walsh, the Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley, and Naked Lunch by William Burroughs?
A: Drugs
5 – Manhood for Amateurs is a 2011 collection of essays by which author, who has previously won the Pulitzer Prize for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
A: Michael Chabon
6 – Which historian coined the term ‘Imagined Communities’ to explain nationalism in his 1983 book, Imagined Communities?
A: Benedict Anderson
7 – Complete the title of AM Homes novel: Music For...
A: Torching
8 – Stephanie Meyer, author of the Twilight series, has also written a stand along novel for adults. What is it called?
A: The Host
9 – Money: A Suicide Note, is a 1984 novel by which author?
A: Martin Amis
10 – Which author has been a very public critic of London 2012, most notably in his recent book Ghost Milk: The End of the Grand Project
A: Iain Sinclair
Round 6: We’re All Going on a Summer Holiday
(Total of 10 points; 1 point per question)
1 - What do the children in E Nesbit’s Five Children and It discover in a sandpit during their summer holiday?
A: A magical creature that can make their wishes come true – the Psamead
2 - Why are the children in Ian McEwan’s The Cement Garden left unsupervised over the course of one long, hot summer?
A: Their parents both die and they hide the body of their mother
3 - In Alex Garland’s The Beach, who gives Richard the hand-drawn map to the hidden ‘paradise’?
A: Daffy Duck
4 - Where is the Ramsay’s summer home in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse?
A: Isle of Skye
5 - In which Dickens novel does an entire family go on a Grand Tour?
A: Little Dorrit
6 - Who wrote the lines “Shall I Compare thee to a Summer’s Day”?
A: William Shakespeare
7 - Which novel by Mary Wesley begins with a group of cousins gathering for a holiday in a large house in Cornwall, on the eve of the Second World War and then follows their fortunes in wartime London?
A: The Camomile Lawn
7 - Which poet wrote the poem ‘Adlestrop’, all about arriving at railway station in the country on a hot summer’s day?
A: Edward Thomas
9 – Summer means Wimbledon (and rain). What is the name of Lionel Shriver’s2006 book about tennis mad couple Eric and Willy?
A: Double Fault
10 – Which novel starts: “It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they executed the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York.”
A: The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
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