My 2013 Reading Challenge Trivia Quiz

Answer: Oklahoma

Oklahoma's cotton-based agriculture was hit hard by the droughts of the 1930s, and the banks that owned most of the farmland evicted most of their tenants who could no longer pay rent. Since the tenants had built their homes on rented land, many would see their houses plowed under by tractors. These scenes figure prominently in Steinbeck's novel, which emphasizes the tragedy of people intimately connected to the land who suddenly finding themselves homeless and, eventually, starving, seemingly with no hope even by the end of the novel.

Steinbeck consistently emphasizes that nearly everyone in the novel is a victim of a larger system of events. The people who evict the Joads are just taking the only jobs that will feed their families, with everyone in the situation desperate just to survive. One sharecropper comes out with a shotgun to defend his land, only realizing that he cannot find anyone to shoot who isn't an innocent. The historian in me knows that most of the "Okies" (a term that is used like a racial slur in the novel) ended up finding abundant work in California military plants - or in the military itself - in the war years beyond the scope of the book, but Steinbeck could not have foreseen that. As it sits, 'The Grapes of Wrath' is as bleak a novel as you are likely to find.

Answer: Endorphin injections

"Seashells" are nearly indistinguishable from ear buds, except they carry signals on their own rather than being wired to anything else. Front rooms in Bradbury's novel are typically surrounded by screens, and the programs are so realistic that one character refers to them as her "family". Newly developed in the story are programs with open silences where viewers can read their own lines from scripts provided. There aren't any injections that I recall in the novel, though characters do pop sleeping pills with regularity. One character attempts suicide this way, then promptly forgets about it.

I expected 'Fahrenheit 451' to be about political censorship, since that has been the context of most book burnings throughout history. To my surprise, it primarily addresses the proliferation of electronic, dumbed-down mass media at the expense of books and meaningful relationships between people. In Bradbury's novel, most homes have been thoroughly fireproofed, so the role of firemen is to burn books - any books, since books in general are seen as arrogant artifacts of the elite that no one wants around anymore. When Bradbury wrote this, electronic mass media meant radio, primarily black & white movies, and some small television sets in affluent homes. Bradbury's predictions have come true to such an extent that his book is probably more relevant today than when it was written.

The edition of 'Fahrenheit 451' that I have has a searing essay Bradbury wrote in 1979. It seems that the novel's publishers had made several subtle edits throughout the manuscript without the author's permission, mostly eliminating mild swear words and references to alcohol. Yes, folks, the most well-known American novel about book censorship was indeed censored for years. Thankfully, the situation was rectified at Bradbury's request.

Answer: "All right, then, I'll go to hell!"

About three-quarters of the way through the novel, Huck ruminates on the morality that the Widow Douglas and other "responsible" adults have tried to instill in him, including the Biblical admonition against stealing and how that applies to helping slaves escape. Huck concludes that aiding the escape of his friend Jim, a slave who has accompanied him for much of the story, would be a sin. That said, Huck is willing to go to Hell for doing what he feels is the right thing. Many critics consider this triumph of conscience over dogma one of the finest moments in American literature. On the other hand, there is also a consensus that the ending of the book, where Huck and Tom Sawyer work to free Jim, is a regression to the hijinks of Twain's book 'Tom Sawyer', and that Twain was stumped about how to resolve the story after making this moral statement.

Twain succeeds in stringing together numerous unrelated anecdotes (including a proto-Nietzschean episode where a man gets away with murder) into a successful novel; reading 'Huckleberry Finn' has given me permission to indulge my digressions if they add to the story. At the risk of being called too politically correct, however, the treatment of blacks in the novel keeps me from endorsing it. Though people who take too much offense at the vocabulary are probably ignoring the book's context (similar racist epithets are used to great effect in admirable novels like 'To Kill a Mockingbird'), it is less excusable to portray nearly every black character in the book like an escapee from a minstrel show. 'Huckleberry Finn' came out twenty years after the Civil War. By the time of its 1885 publication, the US had seen black Senators and Congressmen, and Twain himself knew great black intellectuals like Frederick Douglass. In my subjective judgment, Twain knew better, and he should have shown it here.

Answer: The Fire-Bombing of Dresden

Many fans have speculated that the novel's main character, a poor soldier named Billy Pilgrim who goes on to reasonable success as an optometrist, is based on Vonnegut himself. Vonnegut, a reasonably good soldier by most accounts, denies this, though several characters in the book are based on his fellow soldiers. Vonnegut was a prisoner of war in Dresden when allied forces burned the city, and he worked with the idea of writing about the fire-bombing for years before writing the brutally frank 'Slaughterhouse-Five'. Using the science fiction device of nonlinear time, Vonnegut alludes to Dresden from the beginning of the novel, effectively breaking the horrific experience into smaller pieces amid scenes of success, humiliation, sex, and revenge throughout Pilgrim's life.

Answer: The Tempest

'The Tempest' draws a good deal of attention to itself as a play, with nobleman sorcerer Prospero subtly comparing his magical art to stagecraft. Though structured as a comedy, with Prospero putting aside old grudges over the course of the play and regaining the dukedom that was stolen from him years ago, there are few outright funny parts in the play, and it might be better categorized as a "Shakespearean romance".

Recent scholarship has analyzed 'The Tempest' (the only Shakespearean work to mention the New World) as a story of colonization, with Prospero as the colonizer and his two servants, the obedient Ariel and the surly Caliban, as colonial subjects. Ariel has been interpreted as a native who cooperates with the imperial forces and is rewarded for it, while Caliban is often likened to rebellious subjects who seek independence on their own terms and are demonized by the imperial powers for it. Like many Shakespearean plays, it is a complex work, and is probably best appreciated seen rather than read, though watching it on video while reading along also adds dimension to the experience. (My friend who watched it with me teased me about this until she tried it, too - she is now working on a project combining 'The Tempest' and 'Sharknado'.)

Answer: Boston, Massachusetts

The Frankenstein family is native to Geneva, and the bulk of the action takes place near there. The eponymous main character works for a time on a female monster in the Orkney Islands, only to destroy his creation and his tools out of horror. The novel concludes in the Arctic aboard a ship vainly trying to sail over the North Pole.

'Frankenstein' is often approached as a precursor to science fiction, and the book is often assigned in bioethics courses for budding scientists. It is interesting to note, however, that Victor Frankenstein's approach is decidedly contrary to science. Specifically, his mentors at University chide him for his fascination with mystical writers like sixteenth-century philosopher Cornelius Agrippa and the alchemist Paracelsus; there are no counter-examples from more scientific sources. It is entirely likely that Shelley's work is more a polemic against reaching back into pre-Enlightenment irrational thought than a cautionary tale about science.

Answer: World War I

Like Hemingway himself, the main character in 1929's 'A Farewell to Arms' is an ambulance driver in Italy during the "Great War". Though it would be a stretch to call the hyper-masculine author any kind of pacifist, the novel shows the inherent unfairness of war, especially when the protagonist realizes that he is going to be executed by his own forces for being on the wrong side of a humiliating defeat.

On a personal note, I admit that I read this novel just to see how Hemingway sets up his astonishing ending. I was not disappointed.

Answer: A vampire

There WERE vampire-like creatures in chronicles that date to the time of 'Beowulf', but these creatures do not figure in the poem.

In lines 99-114, Grendel is identified as a descendent of Cain, cursed down through the generations for murdering Abel. Presumably, Grendel's mother is also from Cain's family, though this is not conclusive in the text. The dragon ("wyrm" in the original Old English) rears his head in line 2211, when a slave sneaks into his lair and steals a jeweled goblet, inciting the creature to burn his way through the countryside, killing all in his path until Beowulf and his partner Wiglaf slay him. Beowulf dies from wounds in the battle, and Wiglaf succeeds him as king.

Answer: Willa Cather's 'O Pioneers!'

'O Pioneers!' takes its name from a Walt Whitman poem, and was the first book in Cather's trilogy based on her life in Nebraska; it would be followed by 'The Song of the Lark' and 'My Antonia'. It spends the bulk of its narrative tracing the culture of rural Nebraska and the various European immigrant communities (including Swedes, Bohemians, French, and Norwegians) who made a new home on the Great Plains.

For the record, Cather was the only Nebraska author among the choices. Forster was British, Faulkner was very closely identified with his home state of Mississippi, and Hawthorne was equally linked with New England.

Answer: Jack Kerouac's 'On the Road'

Popular belief holds that Kerouac typed the novel spontaneously while speeding on Benzedrine. In reality, he worked from several notebooks he had kept over the years, and, by all informed accounts, the only drug he used was coffee. The original "scroll" manuscript was also heavily revised before publication, especially to remove the real names of Kerouac's acquaintances; these included well-known American writers like Allen Ginsburg, William S. Burroughs, and Neal Cassady.