Depending on how you look at it, The Original of Laura is either the new book by Vladimir Nabokov, or it is not. For years after his death, Nabokov’s unfinished manuscript lay in a safe, despite the author’s explicit instructions to have it destroyed. Now, in a move that further flouts those instructions, the manuscript has not only been retrieved but also cleaned up and published. It includes a bunch of index cards, on which Nabokov used to write, showing his work in progress; below each card is its text, neatly typed. As a further gimmick — as if resurrecting Nabokov were not nearly enough — the cards can be punched out of the book and shuffled around as per user discretion. The only thing missing, it seems, is the sort of instructions found in the old Choose Your Own Adventure books: “If you think Flora’s husband should stop conducting weird trance experiments upon himself, go straight to Page 50. Otherwise, proceed to the next page.” Read more…

Two people made it to the honour roll today, and one of them cracked the theme correctly as well.

Roopa Machaiah came close to answering all six, and a couple of others weren’t too far off either.

The answers:

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Welcome back to your Thursday afternoon delight — the books quiz. Six questions below, and one theme to rule them all. So give me the answers to the individual questions and identify the theme. Send in your responses to samanth.s@livemint.com or leave them in the comments below.

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A bunch of replies this week, but only one person managed to crack all four questions and make it onto the honour roll. Roopa Machaiah, VJ, Sandeip and Vivek ND came within one answer of joining this week’s winner:
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Ever since Superfreakonomics, the sequel to Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt’s galactically successful Freakaonomics, was released, there has been a spate of articles rubbishing the pair’s new pop-economic hypotheses. Most of these have attacked the research in the book’s section on global warming, which proposes that we just geo-engineer a cooler earth by injecting aerosol suphur into the atmosphere. (The premise: When Mount Pinatubo, in the Philippines, erupted in the early 1990s, it spewed a whole lot of sulphur and ended up bringing down global temperatures a little. Ergo, clearly, that is the most sensible way forward.)

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