Guess the Book from Its Library of Congress Subject Keywords!
Please post your scores in the comments. HONOR SYSTEM, kids. Honor system! Only the nerdiest shall prevail. If you have a degree in library science, please assign yourself a two-point penalty.
1. Married people
College teachers
New England
2. Private investigators
Tourette syndrome
Orphans
Brooklyn (New York, N.Y.)
3. Totalitarianism
London (England)
4. Physicians’ spouses
Adultery
Suicide victims
Middle class
France
5. Parents – Death – Psychological aspects
Brothers
6. Triangles (Interpersonal relations)
Rejection (Psychology)
Rural families
Foundlings
Yorkshire (England)
7. Europeans – Africa
Trading posts
Degeneration
Imperialism
Africa
8. Teenage girls
Country life
Ex-convicts
Sisters
Guilt
England
9. Kings and rulers
Murder victims’ families
Fathers
Revenge
Princes
Denmark
10. Mothers and sons
Young men
New Orleans (La.)
11. Psychotherapist and patient
Obsessive-compulsive disorder
Horses
Teenage boys
12. People with mental disabilities
African American women cooks
Aristocracy (Social class)
Illegitimate children
Brothers and sisters
Mississippi
13. Assimilation (Sociology)
Interracial marriage
Genetic engineering
Fate and fatalism
Ethnic relations
Male friendship
Race relations
Immigrants
London (England)
14. Runaway teenagers
Teenage boys
New York (N.Y.)
15. Greek Americans
Gender identity
Intersexuality
Teenagers
Grosse Pointe (Mich.)
Detroit (Mich.)
16. Social classes
Young women
Courtship
Sisters
England
17. Dominican Americans
18. Executions and executioners
Fathers and daughters
Lookalikes
Paris (France)
London (England)
France – History – Revolution
19. Alienation (Social psychology)
City and town life
Male friendship
Married people
Jewish men
Artists
Dublin (Ireland)
20. Americans – Ukraine
World War, 1939-1945
Jewish families
Grandfathers
Novelists
Young men
Ukraine
21. Children of prostitutes
Fathers and sons
Sibling rivalry
Brothers
Salinas River Valley (Calif.)
22. Missing persons
Mexico City (Mexico)
23. Traffic accidents
Married women
First loves
Rich people
Mistresses
Revenge
Long Island (N.Y.)
24. Married people
Women teachers
Sisters
Widows
New Orleans (La.)
25. Middle-aged men
Girls
***
Answers: (1) Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (2) Motherless Brooklyn (3) 1984 (4) Madame Bovary (5) A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (6) Wuthering Heights (7) Heart of Darkness (8) Atonement (9) Hamlet (10) A Confederacy of Dunces (11) Equus (12) The Sound and the Fury (13) White Teeth (14) The Catcher in the Rye (15) Middlesex (16) Pride and Prejudice (17) The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (18) A Tale of Two Cities (19) Ulysses (20) Everything Is Illuminated (21) East of Eden (22) The Savage Detectives (23) The Great Gatsby (24) A Streetcar Named Desire (25) Lolita
Tags: books, fun games, gillian brassil, librarian humor, library of congress
About Author
by Gillian Brassil
Gillian Brassil hopes to one day contribute to the field of 'Disco dancing -- Juvenile literature.'
I only got 8, but this was fun!
same here!
Now I want to see a list of all the books classified under "married people."
Here's the URL for the "married people" subject search in WorldCat: http://www.worldcat.org/search?q=su:married peo…..
Highlights from the top 10 search results include The Taming of the Shrew, Jane Eyre (burn, Rochester, burn), and two Edith Wharton novels.
I love your user name. It reminds me of giggling through confirmation class and getting scolded by my dad.
I got 12. Here were my guesses (there were some I didn't try to guess):
On the nose: 2, 4, 7, 9, 15, 18, 22, 23, 25
Close enough: 16. Every Jane Austen book, 17. Every Junot Diaz book, 20. That one Jonathan Safran Foer book (not the 9/11 one)
My answer was also kind of right: 3. Richard III, 5. The Brothers Karamazov
Right author, wrong book: 19. Dubliners, 21. Of Mice and Men
Totally wrong, what were you thinking: 13. Never Let Me Go, 24. The Awakening
"JANE AUSTEN???" was also my guess for 16. And I don't know which is sadder, that the clue for 17 was what it was or that I got it exactly.
I also counted myself as right for "anything by Jane Austen." And I got Steinbeck for 21, but didn't count it because I'd frankly totally forgotten that he wrote East of Eden.
(I got: 2, 3, 4, 7, 9, 11, 14, 15, 16, 17, 19, 25)
I totally thought the same thing for 13 — the combo of "genetic engineering" and "England" made me ignore all the other keywords, even though I don't remember any male friendships in that book.
12!
I also went with 'The Brothers Karamazov' for 3 which, come on, should at least count for half a point.
Me too.
I put "Hemingway???" for 7, which I maintain is a legit answer as well. Without that, though, a score of 12. I'm ashamed of myself.
I'm a library science grad but I gotta look SIDE EYE at my LOC peeps for classing Brief Life of Oscar War with ONE SUBJECT HEADING ONLY: "Dominican Americans". Seriously, pals? That's all you got from that novel?
More side eyes from another librarian: only the Chinese edition of Lolita in WorldCat includes the heading "pedophiles — fiction", and at least one includes "love stories". I'm proud of my library's cataloging for once, as we apparently added that heading ourselves. Woohoo!
Not even going to have a go at it, because I know my brain is much better at going "AH YES THAT MAKES TOTAL SENSE" when looking at an answer key than it is at guessing.
My brain is only great at trivia when it means crowing at the slow people on Jeopardy.
Well, the good news is that I identified all the ones I've read (except Heart of Darkness, but only if "trying and failing at least six times to parse the sentence construction and then just deciding that, fuck it, I'm not going to do so well in this unit" counts as reading). The bad news is that I'm not actually all that well-read.
This was so much fun, though. More posts like this! More!
Heart of Darkness is my least favorite book of all time. I got it right, but I kind of wish I hadn't.
I got 10, but I'm giving myself a 10.5 for saying Sense & Sensibility instead of P&P. Because come ON, you guys.
I also had a feeling 21 was Steinbeck but couldn't figure out which one.
I'm always super terrible at guessing these things (probably because I'm equally terrible at summarising books), but I *am* amassing a collection of curiously specific subject keywords and 'physicians' spouses' and 'African American women cooks' make excellent additions.
I mean, they're not as good as my current favorite ('Body snatching – Scotland – Edinburgh – History – 19th century – Juvenile literature'), but what is?
Is there a YA book about Burke & Hare??
The book description (and there is, as far as I can tell, only one book out there in the world under that majestic subject) is sadly unspecific in that regard… but what else can a picture book about 19th century Edinburgh body snatching possibly be about?
RELEVANT TO MY INTERESTS.
That is all.
Update: Just saw the library-school penalty. No fair. :P
Also, love you ladies.
12!
I should have gotten Atonement, since it's one of my favorites–maybe if "nurses" had replaced "country life." Having never read Wuthering Heights, I assumed that 6 was something by Thomas Hardy.
I totally thought it was going to be a Hardy book, too! "Foundlings" threw me off, but it makes sense with Wuthering Heights.
I would like to see more articles in this series.
Seconded!
(Also, I got 13.5. The .5 is for one of those "everything by Junot Diaz" answers.)
That was really fun, and I was surprised how neatly my answers cleaved into three categories:
- books I IDed immediately and without doubt before even finishing their catalog tags
- books I knew I could not ID no matter how long I thought it over
- books I could only ID as "one o' them Bröntes."
19! (I am an English teacher) I also thought that 5 might be The Brothers Karamazov and 10 The Glass Menagerie. My more ridiculous guesses were 22- On The Road, 13- Brave New World (it totally fits!), and 6, which I thought might be The Secret Garden before I came to my senses.
I thought of The Secret Garden too and then sat staring into space trying to remember if any orphans were foundlings while my cats howled for more breakfast.
14 but I'm giving myself a pass for East of Eden, and I saw the Diaz answer in another quiz. (Probably I saw others in the same quiz, but the Diaz stuck firmly in my brain.)
Happy New Year! This was a delightful way to end 2013 for me, because I am That Person.
25, oh my god
I got 12ish. I wonder how I'd do on such a quiz if I didn't abhor and thus choose to not finish (or even start) so many of the books. In high school, I actually came up with a plausible story to convince my teacher she'd lost my reading journal on Heart of Darkness rather than finish the book and write one (but to my credit, she'd had us read HoD back-to-back with A Room of One's Own, and how on earth was I supposed to give a damn about Conrad's phallic insanity when I could instead obsessively pore over every beautiful painful word of Woolf's masterpiece?).
Wow, this is really fun! Although I'm not very good at it.<img src="http://s04.flagcounter.com/mini/mHX/bg_FFFFFF/txt_e3e3e3/border_FFFFFF/flags_1.jpg"; width="1" height="1" />
I got 9! And I picked Sense and Sensibility for #16 and I knew 21 was DEFINITELY Steinbeck so I guessed Tortilla Flat (never read East of Eden). I feel pretty good about this!
Ha! I have to teach a class in library school on classification, and I am TOTALLY starting the term with this exercise. I DO have a degree in library science, and I'll take the 2-point penalty, and am still really proud of my 9-point score.
It's not bad enough I can't even find a job with my library degree, and now you want to penalize me two points on a quiz, as well? :(
What does it say about me that I put Great Expectations for #6 and also for #8?
(I got 17)
I got 14, which I guess isn't too shabby. The clues for The Savage Detectives and Oscar Wao are pathetic though. Mexico City and Dominican people? Really? I don't know what's sadder – that those amazing novels would be reduced to those descriptors, or that I was able to guess correctly because there are so few famous novels that Dominicans or Mexico could be applied to.
13, after the 2 point penalty. What does it say about us that we actually keep score? I tried not to and had to go back to the beginning.
LOC is pretty spotty about subject headings for novels, in my experience, so I guess Savage Detectives and Oscar Wao are lucky they got anything.
17 out of 25. But ashamed, so, so ashamed, of stumbling on 23 & guessing it was The First Wives Club.
12! This is a lot of fun!