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
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
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
A: Prince Edward Island
3.
What
children’s writer’s name was given to asteroid 43844 in 2006?
A: JK Rowling
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
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
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
A: Roald Dahl
7.
In
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Charlie finds the last golden ticket – who
finds the first one?
A: Augustus Gloop
A: Augustus Gloop
8.
Who
leads Mary Lennox to the key to the garden in Francess Hodgson Burnett’s Secret
Garden?
A: The Robin
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
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)
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)
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)
