Book quiz
Well, I don't really enjoy film these days so the film meme is passing me by. I thought instead I would try something similar with passages from books. The passages aren't particularly chosen as memorable (indeed I've steered away from passages with well-known quotes or parts and I **** out all names). Now in this case because there are actually so damned many books in the world it's unlikely any of you have read all of the books I pick here.
So I should say that the point here isn't to show off by guessing the titles of ones you've read but by showing powers of reasoning to get setting and time and "interesting thing".
All comments are screened and I'll give out marks tomorrow.
One point if you can get within twenty five years of when it was written. (Half point for within fifty years).
One point if you can get the genre/setting (so I'm looking for something like "nineteenth century adventure" "near future sci-fi" "contemporary new york" "cod medieval fantasy").
One point for author and/or title or series of books.
However, if you don't know the actual book/author I will give you a completely unfair discretionary point if you can guess something quite interesting about the book or author just from the text provided (not something obvious like "they start sentences with conjunctions" or "they're inexplicably fond of the Oxford comma". So you can still get full points if you don't know any of the actual books.
Really though, what I'm interested in is why you think what you think about the passages and how you tie them to a place and time. I think for some of them at least, the title should be guessable though. Comments are screened.
Quote 1:
Fifty yards of tiptoeing brought them to a door which the Director cautiously opened. They stepped over the threshold into the twilight of a shuttered dormitory. Eighty cots stood in a row against the wall. There was a sound of light regular breathing and a continuous murmur, as of very faint voices, remotely whispering.
A nurse rose as they entered and came to attention before the Director.
"What's the lesson for this afternoon?" he asked.
"We had Elementary Sex for the first forty minutes," she answers, "But now it's switched over to Elementary Class Consciousness."
Quote 2:
Know, Oh my brother, that I was living a most comfortable and enjoyable life, in all solace and delight, as I told you yesterday, until one day my mind became possessed with the thought of travelling about the world of men and seeing their cities and islands; and a longing seized me to traffic and to make money by trade. Upon this resolve I took a great store of cash and, buying goods and gear fit for travel and bound them up in bales. Then I went down to the river-bank where I found a noble ship and brand-new about to sail, equipped with sails of fine cloth and well manned and provided; so I took passage in her, with a number of other merchants, and after embarking our goods we weighed anchor the same day.
Quote 3:
I saw the heads of two orange-clad people coming through the bushes and under some blossom-covered apple-trees towards me. I turned smiling to them and beckoned them to me. They came, and then, pointing to the bronze pedestal, I tried to intimate my wish to open it. But at my first gesture towards this they behaved very oddly. I don't know how to convey their expression to you. Suppose you were to use a grossly improper gesture to a delicate-minded woman - it is how she would look. They went off as if they had received the last possible insult.
Quote 4:
I went straight upstairs, got the bird cage, took it down, and left it in front of her door. That settled that. Or so I imagined until the next morning when, as I was leaving for work, I saw the cage perched on a sidewalk ashcan waiting for the garbage collector. Rather sheepishly I rescued it and carried it back to my room, a capitulation that did not lessen my resolve to put **** absolutely out of my life. She was, I decided, "a crude exhibitionist", "a time waster", "an utter fake": someone never to be spoken to again.
Quote 5:
Now, maybe the lobster is what did it. That taboo, so easily and simply broken, confidence may have been given to the whole slimy, suicidal Dionysian side of my nature; the lesson may have been learned that to break the law, all you have to do is -- just go ahead and break it! All you have to do is stop trembling and quaking and finding it unimaginable and beyond you: all you have to do is do it! What else I ask you, were all those prohibitative dietary rules and regulations all about to begin with...
Quote 6:
Someone - **** guessed it was young Jean, not yet seventeen - was sobbing unashamedly and loudly. The men had reached breaking point. Someone else, someone with greater powers of inspiration, might have got them to move again, **** told himself, but it was beyond him. Had the ford been practicable, they would have crossed it, and staggered on a mile or two the other side, but in the face of this disappointment they were capable of nothing further tonight. And they knew, the same as he did, that there was nothing to go on for.
Quote 7
"Hells' bells ****. Have you any idea how much I admired you? Any idea at all? Your talent? You used to come into the changing room sometimes dressed as Oscar Wilde or Noel Coward or whoever and stride up and down like a prince. You used to make me feel so small. All the things you can do. My mother thinks I'm a bore. I used to wish I could be you. I fantasised being you. I would lie awake at night imagining what it would be like to have your tall body and your smile, your wit and words. And of course I loved you... "