Many thanks to all those of you who took part in yesterday's quiz: we'll be revealing the answers in a moment ...
But first, here's the link to today's quiz. It's Mr Harris's regular 'can you judge a book by its cover?' round. Five book covers, titles removed - what are they? (and bonus points if you know who wrote them).
Yesterday, Mr Hudson flummoxed many quizzers with his 'book titles that are actually quotations'. The multiple-choice format gave you options - a 1 in 4 chance of getting it right. Sadly, that didn't help ...
Book 1 was E M Forster's A Passage to India:
Passage to India!
Lo, soul, seest thou not God’s purpose from the first?
The earth to be spann’d, connected by network,
The races, neighbors, to marry and be given in marriage,
The oceans to be cross’d, the distant brought near,
The lands to be welded together.
An impressive seven of you correctly identified this - but it was the second lowest score in the whole of this round. If you read the novel, you should definitely pick up on the irony Forster lends to Whitman's words ...
Book 2 should be familiar to some of the sixth form: Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart is one of the current GCSE set texts for English Literature. But where's the title from?
It's from W B Yeats's 'The Second Coming', as a respectable 42% of you knew:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world ...
Written in 1919, when global conflict and a flu pandemic had left millions dead, and the Irish War of Independence was moving towards its height, Yeats's poem expressed the imminence of cultural and political collapse, entirely appropriate as an epigraph for Achebe's powerful account of the impact of colonialism in 1890s Nigeria.
Book 3 was John Steinbeck's heartbreaking classic, Of Mice and Men.
Just over a third of you knew that its title comes from Robert Burns's 'To a Mouse'. Lamenting the fate of the 'wee, sleekit, cowrin', tim'rous beastie', whose nest his plough has casually destroyed, Burns concludes that it's not just the little creatures of the world who suffer - things go wrong for all of us: 'the best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men/Gang aft agley' (often go wrong). As indeed they do for George and Lennie, Curly's wife, and pretty much everybody else in the novel. Even the rabbits.
Book 4 is another classic of twentieth century American literature, William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, which also takes its title from a Scot.
Reassuringly, at least half of you knew recognised this as a memorable moment from Macbeth's final soliloquy. Learning of his wife's death, and bitterly reflecting on where their ambition has brought them, life is, Macbeth concludes, 'a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury - signifying nothing.' Cheerful stuff! And entirely appropriate for Faulkner's epic tale of generational decline.
Book 5 - The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time - produced by far the highest recognition rate:
The novel takes its title from one of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories, 'The Adventure of Silver Blaze', in which the brilliant detective (on whom Haddon's protagonist Christopher models himself) solves the mystery of a missing race-horse, and the murder of its trainer:
Colonel Ross still wore an expression which showed the poor opinion which he had formed of my companion’s ability, but I saw by the Inspector’s face that his attention had been keenly aroused.
“You consider that to be important?” he asked.
“Exceedingly so.”
“Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”
“To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”
“The dog did nothing in the night-time.”
“That was the curious incident,” remarked Sherlock Holmes.
As a mighty 75% of you correctly detected.
Book 6 was John Kennedy Toole's posthumously published classic, A Confederacy of Dunces.
The title comes, appropriately enough, from a work by another fine satirist:
'When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him. '
40% of you rightly attributed this to Jonathan Swift but another 40% were equally convinced it was Oscar Wilde. Wilde did indeed tell a customs officer, on landing in New York, 'I have nothing to declare except my genius', but sadly, Wilde is more an illustration of the truth of Swift's aphorism than author of it.
Book 7 was tough. F Scott Fitzgerald's novel of marital breakdown on the Riviera, Tender is the Night, takes its title from Keats's 'Ode to a Nightingale':
Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
Already with thee! tender is the night ...
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays;
But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.
But only three of you knew this: Atom, Max K and Max S - take a moonlit bow.
Finally, Book 8 - Ernest Hemingway's World War I classic, For Whom the Bell Tolls - one of the most powerfully resonant titles of all time:
Its source? Licentious poet turned preacher John Donne:
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main ... any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
Timely in 1624, when Donne had just recovered from a near fatal illness, and just as timely now, even though the world apparently looks very different to some world leaders. Big oceans are indeed convenient.
So where does that leave the leaderboard? At the end of today's round, Freddie, Ari and Adam are in joint third place, with 6 correct answers; Theo is in second place with 7; and in first place, with a mighty 8 out of 8, is Max S. Will he still be there tomorrow? Only one way to find out ...!
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