Quiz

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Q1. #10 · 8th Century BCE · Our superstar warrior spends most of the war sulking in his tent because the boss confiscated his favorite war prize, and only rage-quits back into the fight after his best friend Patroclus gets killed wearing his borrowed armor — at which point he goes fully feral and drags Prince Hector's corpse laps around the city. Notably horse-free and heel-free, whatever everyone "remembers." Homer’s foundational war epic of the Western canon.

Q2. #12 · 1308–1320 · Our hero hires Virgil as his afterlife tour guide, except the guide, being a pagan, gets stopped at Heaven's velvet rope and handed to the author's old crush. Everybody only ever wants to talk about the one volume set in Hell, whose tiered, sinner-sorted geography still shapes how the West pictures damnation. Bonus: it's written in the everyday Tuscan that became modern Italian.

Q3. #16 · 1985 · A nosediving birth rate turns fertile women into government-issued breeders in the Republic of Gilead, where our narrator's name, no joke, just means "belongs to Fred." The red robes and white bonnets proved such a potent image they jumped off the page into real-world protests, becoming global shorthand in fights over who controls women's bodies.

Q4. #54 · 1862 · Bread thief Jean Valjean spends decades getting stalked by broody cop Javert, all against a doomed Paris uprising that out-Occupies Occupy Wall Street. One of history's great cries against poverty and injustice, and one of the most-adapted stories ever, eventually the backbone of the world's longest-running musical.

Q5. #58 · 1387 · A squire, a miller, a wife of Bath, and a bunch of other people tell their stories on the way to a saint’s shrine in a British town with a prominent archbishop. Bawdy medieval smack-talking that put English literature on the map.

Q6. #67 · 1943 · A pilot crashes in the Sahara and meets a small blond traveler who's flown in from his personal asteroid to vent about a high-maintenance rose. Cue gentle gut-punches about love and loss, aimed at adults but shelved with the picture books. Now the most-translated French work ever and a tender rite of passage for readers in 500-odd languages.

Q7. #88 · 1884 · A runaway boy and an escaped enslaved man named Jim raft down the Mississippi, dodging con men and the kid's own guilty conscience. Told in such pitch-perfect everyday twang that Hemingway swore all modern American literature flows from this one book. It's also been fought over in classrooms ever since for how it stares slavery and race dead in the eye.

Q8. #92 · 1837 · Two con artists sell a vain ruler an outfit supposedly invisible to anyone too dim or unfit for their job, so the whole court gushes over his birthday suit rather than admit they see a naked man, until one tactless kid blows it. A 19th-century fairy tale that handed every language its go-to phrase for the lone honest voice puncturing a crowd's polite delusion.

Q9. #93 · 1906 · Meant to make you weep for exploited immigrant workers in Chicago's slaughterhouses, it instead made everyone gag at what was going into the sausage. Public outrage was so fierce it pushed Congress to pass the Pure Food and Drug Act within months. The author grumbled he'd aimed for America's heart and hit its stomach.

Q10. #96 · 1845 · A heartbroken guy up way past midnight gets a visit from a goth bird that perches on a statue and answers his every anguished question with the same one-word buzzkill. That hypnotic chant made its American author an overnight sensation and locked in the brooding gothic mood that still defines the spooky season two centuries on.

TIEBREAKER In which of The Odyssey’s 24 books does the reader first meet Odysseus?

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