Name the most essential Books ever yo. The ones the human race can't do without. Based on this: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/mar/01/news) List. But constantly being updated with things that meet my criteria
The Yellow answer Cells are ones I have completed
The Purple answer Cells are ones I have Partially Completed
The Darkness of the yellow doesn't matter. I'm just lazy to fix it.
This quiz is meant to be an almost constant work in progress! I will add (And very rarely, subtract) works to this list as more qualifying works come to my attention. Also keep me posted on Spelling, seeing as this is such a large content quiz I may get things wrong. Thanks for coming here and your patience
panscedar, This list I personally went through and consulted many websites and English Professors. By tallying those results, I came up with the top 101. These are just what people thought. I used this: ( https://www.theguardian.com) Website for the authors but that doesn't matter. And if you would like, I can add more time. Thank you for your comment! Sorry if I seemed mean :(
panscedar was talking about your spelling mistakes. No one will ever get Jane Eyre if you spell it Jayne Ire. (And Charlotte Bronte, not Charolette). Also, Siddharta, not Siddiharta. Owen Meany, not Owen Meaney etc.
Agreed: it's a good quiz but there are far too many typos - Jane Eyre, Rolad Dahl, a lot of others - and you need to allow answers with and without "The" at the start (some do work without and some don't).
I agree. Also E.M. Forster is spelt Forester. :( In Adichie's "Half of a Yellow Sun" one word ("of") is missing from the title. I did guess "The Time Traveler's Wife", but only after remembering "traveler" is a valid spelling instead of "traveller". You might add the latter as a type-in.
Minor corrections: Charlotte Bronte (It says 'Charolette'), Kenneth Grahame, Mary Shelley with an e, Herman Melville, Patricia Highsmith... and not to be pedantic, but Hesse's book title is 'SIDDHARTHA' not Siddharta, no wonder my answer wasn't accepted ;)
Typed "Huckleberry Finn". Added "Adventures of". Still no good. It's never necessary to include a leading "The", but "Adventures of" should also be optional.
"And" should never be mandatory because people sometimes use an ampersand. The Jetpunk standard would accept "Pride Prejudice" and "Sense Sensibility", for instance.
My kind of quiz since I've actually read 50 of the 53 I got..not counting the 7 I missed for the same reason already mentioned in the comments...type-ins should accept titles without "A" or "The."
Really surprised that "Satanic Verses" was not the Rushdie opus included. The Hemingway novel is so little known that it wasn't even mentioned in an American literature class I took for my Master's degree!
Bravo to you for creating this challenging quiz! Now you need to get busy reading some of these that you evidently haven't read yet..."Gatsby" is close to a perfect novel, if there could be such a thing. "Poisonwood Bible" is a masterpeice. I know Moby Dick and "Don Quixote" aren't everyone's cup of tea, but try them, you might be surprised!
"Cold Comfort Farm" is loony and fun. "Rebecca" must surely be one of the most engrossing plots ever conceived. The main character of "Vanity Fair" is a real b..ch, but certainly memorable.
Thanks for bringing these masterworks into one big picture!
Glad to hear your thoughts! I too have enjoyed a good portions of the reads here. I am getting to the Rushdie one and will let you know if I reconsider it according to my parameters of how I put things on here. I'm on War and Peace now and that will take a bit. Either way thank you.
I haven't read The Satanic Verses, but I have read Midnight's Children and I think that's a valid selection for the author. It's a Booker prize winner and definitely among his best known works. If TSV is more well-known it's only because of the fatwa.
Interesting list, but still a few typos to be fixed, including a couple that prevent acceptance of the correct answer:
- Infinite Jest (currently misspelled Infiinte)
- Fahrenheit 451 (currently misspelled Farenheit)
I would also suggest accepting "The Count of Monte Cristo" since that's the actual title; currently you only accept it without "The", so I missed it.
Relatedly, I missed A Confederacy of Dunces because I didn't type in the "A". That's technically fair, since I didn't have the full title, but some of the other answers don't require the initial article, so you might want to revisit that decision.
Also, Charlotte Bronte is currently misspelled Charoltte, and Patricia Highsmith is misspelled Higsmith, but those are less of an issue since they're clues rather than answers.
And Hernandez's book is overwelmingly known as just Martin Fierro, so much that I had totally forgotten the full title and was baffled when I typed the name alone and wasn't accepted.
Once you spend the time to spellcheck every title and every author, clean up the colors and add some more of the obvious type-ins, this will be a great quiz. Until then, it's a pretty cool book list but it doesn't play well. It's plenty hard enough remembering that The Time Traveler's Wife was written by Niffenegger or guessing which of Rushdie's or Solzhenitsyn's masterpieces you decided to include without also needing to guess whether you insist on the "a" or "and" or what The Complete Works of Dr Seuss is called exactly.
I love such quizzes, so thank you! It's inspiring to see so many contemporaries side by side with classics, lots of books I've already read and lots of others to look up. I'll definitely get back to it from time to time later.
There are still quite a few mistakes, though, and some type-ins should be included. I've mentioned them above in another comment.
(Can't believe I'm the only one here who knows "The Blood of Flowers" by Anita Amirrezvani. I didn't think there would be many who guessed it, but I wasn't prepared for a 0 per cent. It's a good story, though. Really.)
You can standardize the color by copying the cell and pasting it on the others. If you think it'll be a bit of work, you can add me as a collab and I'll do it. Just...really kinda throws me off.
Well I just put it in the context that the entire Western canon is based off of the whole premise of the Bible. While Muslims have many followers as do Hindus and such, The Bible is an essential contextual piece for many more by virtue of, well Europe kinda not minding it's own business and colonial stuff. Plus if we go by the base form of it, Muslims and Jews believe in some form of the base Abrahamic Bible.
Great quiz. The world will get by without Harry Potter in my opinion... without even knowing he has gone. I nominated the quiz nevertheless.
I put in about seven correct answers but they would not click in. A strange ability I have is knowing the authors of books I have not even cracked open. Lol.
Thank you for the nomination! Let me know if you have any suggestions for type ins as the volume of answers makes it hard to get all the good ones without help. And I actually am debating removing some works including Potter, the issue is my metric versus my taste, it may be a bit more before I'm comfortable taking off some of the ones on here I would posit are overrated.
good quiz
:) Enjoyed this quiz anyway.
Dante's name is spelled wrong - Alighieri, not Alghieri
"And" should never be mandatory because people sometimes use an ampersand. The Jetpunk standard would accept "Pride Prejudice" and "Sense Sensibility", for instance.
Jerimiah = Jeremiah
Ezekial = Ezekiel
Really surprised that "Satanic Verses" was not the Rushdie opus included. The Hemingway novel is so little known that it wasn't even mentioned in an American literature class I took for my Master's degree!
Bravo to you for creating this challenging quiz! Now you need to get busy reading some of these that you evidently haven't read yet..."Gatsby" is close to a perfect novel, if there could be such a thing. "Poisonwood Bible" is a masterpeice. I know Moby Dick and "Don Quixote" aren't everyone's cup of tea, but try them, you might be surprised!
"Cold Comfort Farm" is loony and fun. "Rebecca" must surely be one of the most engrossing plots ever conceived. The main character of "Vanity Fair" is a real b..ch, but certainly memorable.
Thanks for bringing these masterworks into one big picture!
- Infinite Jest (currently misspelled Infiinte)
- Fahrenheit 451 (currently misspelled Farenheit)
I would also suggest accepting "The Count of Monte Cristo" since that's the actual title; currently you only accept it without "The", so I missed it.
Relatedly, I missed A Confederacy of Dunces because I didn't type in the "A". That's technically fair, since I didn't have the full title, but some of the other answers don't require the initial article, so you might want to revisit that decision.
Also, Charlotte Bronte is currently misspelled Charoltte, and Patricia Highsmith is misspelled Higsmith, but those are less of an issue since they're clues rather than answers.
And Hernandez's book is overwelmingly known as just Martin Fierro, so much that I had totally forgotten the full title and was baffled when I typed the name alone and wasn't accepted.
There are still quite a few mistakes, though, and some type-ins should be included. I've mentioned them above in another comment.
(Can't believe I'm the only one here who knows "The Blood of Flowers" by Anita Amirrezvani. I didn't think there would be many who guessed it, but I wasn't prepared for a 0 per cent. It's a good story, though. Really.)
I put in about seven correct answers but they would not click in. A strange ability I have is knowing the authors of books I have not even cracked open. Lol.