Category: Quizzes

4 Dickens Christmas Stories You’ve Probably Never Heard Of.

The stories are:

• The Chimes
• The Cricket on the Hearth
• The Battle of Life
• The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain

Of course I have heard of them. I have an English degree, for cryin’ out loud.

It helps that they were all collected in the Walter J. Black edition of A Christmas Carol that I read in 2008. Reading that book nine years ago around Christmas time might have kicked off my mostly annual tradition of reading a Christmas-themed book around this time of year.

Someone has taken a several Best Books of 2017 lists and coallated the information into a single list that weights the books based on how many times they appeared on the best of lists.

You know me; any list of books, and I make it a quiz.

So here we go: Which of best books of 2017 have I read? I have put in bold the books I have read; I have put in red the books I own and have yet to read, and in underline books that I want to get someday.

For the fiction:

• Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward
• Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
• Exit West by Mohsin Hamid
• Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan
• Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng
• White Tears by Hari Kunzru
• The Power by Naomi Alderman
• The Ninth Hour by Alice McDermott
• The Answers by Catherine Lacey
• What We Lose by Zinzi Clemmons
• The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy
• Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
• Mrs. Fletcher by Tom Perrotta
• Ill Will by Dan Chaon
• Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado
• Goodbye, Vitamin by Rachel Khong

For the nonfiction:

• Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann
• We Were Eight Years in Power by Ta-Nehisi Coates
• The Rules Do Not Apply by Ariel Levy
• The Future Is History by Masha Gessen
• You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me by Sherman Alexie
• Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood
• Hunger by Roxane Gay
• Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari
• What Happened by Hillary Clinton
• The Evolution of Beauty by Richard O. Prum
• Sticky Fingers by Joe Hagan
• Locking Up Our Own by James Forman Jr.
• Leonardo da Vinci by Walter Isaacson
• Grant by Ron Chernow
• Behave by Robert M. Sapolsky
• Ants Among Elephants by Sujatha Gidla

That’s right.

Not a damned one.

I’ll let you, gentle reader, be the judge of whether that more indicts books published in 2017 or the taste of people who publish Best Books Of lists. To be honest, more likely the latter.

If you’re asking what the last comic book I read was (and you might just be, or might would have been being if you read the linked post yesterday instead of reading me weekly, in which case we’ll get to the last comic book I read and the significance of my reading comic books, close parentheses–oops, did I say that out loud? I meant), it was a Classics Illustrated version of David Copperfield. Now, you’re saying, “Man, that must have been hard, collapsing a Dickens novel into 40 pages of panels and sentences!”

You have no idea. I am certain the comic did not ruin the book for me when I get around to reading it in prose. As a matter of fact, I think I’ll actually know what is going on and discover the book is not actually a music video cut-scene style collage of characters when I read the book. But as for a last comic book that I might ever read, David Copperfield is pretty hoity-toity.

On the back, there’s a list of other titles available in Classics Illustrated editions.

It’s not a comprehensive list, as the numbers skip wildly. But I took it to be a challenge to my well-readhood, so I’ve identified the books I’ve read in actual book form below the fold.
Continue reading “They Weren’t Comic Books When I Read Them” →

I got 95% in this quiz: Can you name the missing word in each book title?

I’d identify the books by name and author I’ve read in a typical quiz post, but that would kind of defeat the point if you were to try the quiz yourself.

Allow me to say:

• I have read 17 (maybe 18) of 42 on the list (most of which do not appear in book reports on this site and many of which are due to the legendary Swedish Mechanic);
• I have started (but not finished) 3 on the list, but I might soon since my mother-in-law might be reading one of them currently;
• Not counting those 3, I have 4 others on my to-read shelves.

2 of them, clearly, I have never heard of.

Make of it what you will, but I’d like to point out my English degree is not in literature, but in writing.

(Link via the Springfield-Greene County Library’s Facebook feed.)

The proprietrix of ABC Books shared this link because her bookstore is on’t: The 9 Best Bookstores in Missouri!.

How did I do on the quiz? The book stores I’ve visited have their titles in bold:

1. Subterranean Books, St. Louis I went once after Sheldon sold A Collector’s Book Shop, but it wasn’t the same without Sheldon telling someone not to pull the book out by the top of the spine.
2. Prospero’s Book Store, Kansas City My beautiful wife and I went to a number of bookstores in KC a while back, but I’m not sure that we visited this one; I’ve looked at the street view of it, and it looks familiar, but I’m not sure. We drove all over. Somewhere out in the sticks, we went to a bookstore run by one of the aforementioned Sheldon’s former employees.
3. Yellow Dog Bookshop, Columbia I’ve never been to Yellow Dog, but I’ve been to Acorn Books, which I notice isn’t on the list, which is great because I have a twenty-year-long grudge against Ken, the owner.
4. ABC Books Of course, I’ve been to ABC Books. The article said it’s a great place to browse on Saturdays; perhaps I would save some money if I only browsed there on Saturdays.
5. The Book Rack, Cape Girardeau I’ve never been to Cape Girardeau, but if I had, I’d probably have visited.
6. Hooked on Books, Springfield You, gentle reader, will remember I used to come to Hooked on Books when I visited Springfield before I moved to the area. I still do, but somehow not as often as ABC Books and neither as much as before I started limiting myself mostly to library book sales.
7. River Read Books, Lexington I’ve never been to Lexington, either.
8. Calvin’s Books, Branson We visited this book shop within the last year.
9. Rose’s Bookhouse, O’Fallon What? This book shop is a mile or so away from the print shop where I worked for two years, and I never heard of it. But we’ll hit it the next time we’re in St. Louis, I’ll wager.

That’s only four of the nine, a failing grade.

I must try harder!

At OregonMuse’s prompting, I took the Christian Science Monitor‘s Famous Literary Detective Skills Quiz.

When I went through it the first time on my phone, I got a 73%, but when I went through it on my computer preparing this blog post, I got:

77%.

This indicates I guessed one better on the English detective novels on the computer. Note the mobile version of the quiz does not show you the right answers as you go along, which explains why I only did one better guessing the second time around instead of getting them all right to impress you, gentle reader.