The Number You Have Reached... Quiz

Answer: Big Brother

Probably modeled after the friendly face with which "Uncle Joe" Stalin masked Soviet dictatorship, Big Brother is supposedly concerned only with his people's best interests. He will take on any burden to help them, be it spreading propaganda through the Ministry of Truth; watching individuals constantly through television-like screens; or even torturing or killing the insufficiently grateful. And what can one person do about it? Remember, Big Brother is watching ...

Answer: Seven

"Seven Against Thebes" was the third in a prizewinning trilogy about the tragedies of Oedipus and his family. Today, the first two plays ("Laius" and "Oedipus") are lost, but "Seven Against Thebes" survives as a testament to the father of tragedy. In the play, the sons of the doomed Oedipus - Polynices and Eteoclus - battle over the city of Thebes. Eteoclus is inside the walls; Polynices leads the army outside of it. The Seven are the captains of Polynices' army, each of whom attacks one of the gates of the city; the last of them is Polynices himself. If you're familiar with the tropes of Greek tragedy, it will not surprise you to hear that Polynices finally faces his brother, and that both die in the struggle.

Sophocles wrote another set of three plays about the same family, all of which survive and are still sometimes performed: "Oedipus Rex", "Oedipus at Colonna", and "Antigone". Antigone was the sister of these two ill-fated brothers, and she was herself doomed for her love of them.

Answer: A Buddhist monastery

The story was first published in 1953, so the computer is primitive by today's standards: to perform its tabulations, it needs both careful programming and periodic attention. The monastery, isolated in the mountains of Tibet, has hired the engineers to ensure the machine completes its task: listing the nine billion names of God, according to rules laid down ages ago.

The engineers find the goal funny -- and then they find it frightening. The story is well worth a read.

Answer: The temperature at which paper ignites

The novel's protagonist is employed as a "fireman" -- but in this grim future, his job is not to fight fires but to set them. All books, you see, have been outlawed in favor of more mind-numbing (and propaganda-friendly) entertainment. Our hero, Guy Montag, begins the 1953 book as a competent and content destroyer of illicit libraries, and ends it as a member of the underground literati.

Answer: Edgar Allan Poe

The story, which first appeared in 1845, begins with Poe's recapitulation of the basic story of Scheherazade: how the king married a new maiden every night and put her to death each morning, and how the beautiful and cunning Scheherazade postponed her own doom by telling a thrilling story each night, and leaving it tantalizingly near its climax at the appointed hour of her execution.

After a thousand and one nights, the king had fallen in love, and spared her life forever - except, of course, in Poe's retelling, wherein Scheherazade cannot help but launch into a new tale of Sinbad's increasingly implausible adventures. I don't want to tell you how this one ends!

Answer: Mormonism

The historical figure in this 2009 book is Ann Eliza Young, by some reckonings the nineteenth wife of the Mormon prophet Brigham Young. In those days, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS) practiced polygamy, but Young's break from her husband -- and public accusations about the injustices of the lifestyle -- helped inflame public opinion.

The LDS church no longer condones polygamy, but some fundamentalist Mormons require it, and the book's modern hero grew up in such a community. Exiled due to his homosexuality -- and due to the demographic math of a system where one man might have more than a dozen wives -- he returns to help his mother, who stands accused of his father's murder. (She had been, by some counts, the victim's nineteenth wife.) Both stories are poignantly told.

Answer: The firebombing of Dresden

The title of the book refers to the converted building in which the American Billy is held as a prisoner of war. After the destruction of the surrounding city by Allied bombs, he is a witness to the total devastation of a beautiful city. Over and over, in a life-lived-out-of-order in which he is kidnapped by aliens, has two families, and is murdered, he returns to the scene of this original horror. "So it goes" is the book's fatalist refrain, invoked with every ordinary and extraordinary tragedy of war.

Answer: Khaled Hosseini

"A Thousand Splendid Suns", released in 2007, shared a setting and some themes with 2003's "The Kite Runner". Two Afghan women - to whom many paths are denied because of their sex - inhabit a deeply circumscribed world that is nonetheless much more complex than it appears at first. Both married to the same abusive man, their passions, struggles, and friendship illuminate a bleak plotline, like the "splendid suns" of the title. (The image comes from a poem written by Saib Tabrizi in the 1600s, referring to "the thousand splendid suns that hide behind [Kabul's] walls.")

Answer: 2001

Clarke wrote "2001: A Space Odyssey" while working with Stanley Kubrick on a movie version of the same story; the film won the race, but the book makes a lot more sense. The story begins early in hominid evolution, but most of the action takes place in 2001, on a manned mission looking for the origin of the monoliths.

This space voyage includes one of the most famous subplots in science fiction: the descent into treachery of the shipboard computer, the HAL-9000. (There's another number!) Three sequels reference three later years: 2010, 2061, and 3001.

Answer: Life of Pi

In this 2001 book by Yann Martel, Pi is the nickname of the boy; it doesn't really refer to the famous transcendental number, but bear with me. Pi's parents are zookeepers, and they're traveling with a whole menagerie when their ship sinks. The novel follows Pi, on the open ocean, as he struggles to survive and as he (eventually) reaches a kind of understanding with the big cat. Or does he? The final scenes in the book cast doubt on what has come before, and the reader must choose what story she wants to believe.