World Book Day Quizzes: Round 4

It's World Book Day!!! And we've got an abundance of book themed quizzes for you. Thanks very much to everyone who participated in yesterday's quiz: we'll be revealing the correct answers (and some of the most inventive wrong ones) in a moment.

But first, here's a link to today's quiz questions, which have been kindly supplied by Mr Green.  He's given you some anagrams of novels related to fantasy, the supernatural and the fantastical: can you figure out their titles? Bonus points, of course, if you can also identify the author ...

You've also got one more day to enter the Kayton Library's 'Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?' quiz and win those fabulous Nando's vouchers. Visit the table outside the library, or look at the photos here, to see if you can identify the literary characters each place setting represents. You can submit your answers here.   

Here's Guest 1:

Guest 2:

Guest 3: 

Guest 4: 

Guest 5:

Guest 6: 

Guest 7: 

And finally Guest 8: 

If you think you've figured out who they are, submit your answers on the Google form: good luck!

Meanwhile back to Mr Harris's book covers. Did you recognise them? Here's Cover 1:

35% of you correctly identified it as 

- here in its original 1939 edition. Those who didn't still made a decent effort. Some got the right author but the wrong book: it's not 'Of Mice and Men' (or even 'Of Men and Mice'). Nor is it 'Animal Farm 2'. And it's most definitely not  'Goodbye Yellow Dirt Road by Elton John' (nice try, tho).  

Cover 2 - 

- was more of a challenge. It's Barry Trengrove's original cover for the first edition of  

It's not the most familiar image for Burgess's novel -  David Pelham's cover for Penguin's 1972 edition, inspired by the designs of Kubrick's film adaptation (see here) is certainly more iconic - but it does contain a significant clue. Zoom in on the speech bubble, and you might just recognise the language: 

Yes, this is Burgess's invented language 'nadsat', the fusion of Russian, Romany and Cockney rhyming slang spoken by Alex and his fellow droogs. So if you spotted that (and 25% of you did), it definitely helped - or hindered, as we gather from some of your other suggestions, including 'The Jabberwocky', 'The Great Bolshy Yarbalocks', and 'Utter Nonsense' (we feel your pain).  

In contrast, Cover 3 achieved almost universal recognition:

It is, of course, Moby Dick by Herman Melville:

Not 'Titanic.' Or 'The Monster in the Ocean'. Or 'Pinocchio, without the puppet but just the whale' by PETA'.  We did say almost universal recognition ...

Cover 4 - 

was much more of a challenge.  Several of you saw the hearts and leapt straight to romance, including 'Beautiful Hearts', 'Love is the Answer', 'Romeo and Julliet' [sic] and 'Pride and Prejudice' ('if in doubt, try Jane Austen': sage advice from Mrs Cummings).  Others saw a playing card ('The Nine of Hearts'), and went off in a different direction, often via Lewis Carroll's Wonderland.  Some ventured even further afield, with 'Heart of Darkness' and 'Plato's Republic' (???).  Once you know the answer, you'll be kicking yourselves. It was, of course the first of the James Bond books - 

And this is another first edition cover, designed with the help of the author himself.  If you'd like to remind yourself of Daniel Kleinman's stunning credit sequence for the 2006 movie, you can find it here.  

Finally, if you thought Cover 4 was hard, Cover 5 - 

was well-nigh impossible. There were some ingenious suggestions - some even plausible: 'London Fields by Martin Amis', 'The Ballad of Peckham Rye by Muriel Spark' or 'Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino', for instance. Quite a few of you opted for Tolkien's The Two Towers. Makes sense. They are towers. And there's two of them. And although Tolkien's own drawings of Minas Morghul and Orthanc are arguably more medieval in spirit - 

his words aren't entirely unevocative of Book 5's dust-jacket: 

'Paler indeed than the moon ailing in some slow eclipse was the light of it now, wavering and blowing like a noisome exhalation of decay, a corpse-light, a light that illuminated nothing.' 

'It was fashioned by the builders of old ... yet it seemed a thing not made by the craft of Men, but riven from the bones of the earth in the ancient torment of the hills ...'

Critics of Brutalism might very well agree.  But it's not any of these. Nor is it 'Tilted Towers from Fortnite', 'The Book of Lost Layers', 'Pressure Washer Simulator 2'or 'Most Common Architectural Mistakes by Bill Dingtopple'. Definitely not.  It's High Rise by 'the same guy who wrote crash but I can't remember his name' (don't worry, we can: it's J G Ballard):

And only 8 of you got this one right. 

So where does that leave our leaderboard? Well, still wearing the yellow jersey, far out ahead of the pack, it's Max S: in second place, it's Theo; in third, it's Adam and Mr Thumwood, and Austin, Freddie, Mrs Cummings and Mrs Wilkinson are hanging on in there, with the rest of the peloton.  Thanks to Mr Harris for the questions, and also to Atom, Nathaniel, Jacob and Ying for particularly witty and inventive answers.  Two days to go - is Max going to manage the threepeat?  We'll have to wait and see ...!