These Quizzes Are Hard, and Other News

Can you guess these classic books from their phantom covers? In a word: no. (Well, three of them.)
Guess these famous novels from their second lines? We batted like .600.
Also disspiritingly difficult: this John le Carré quiz.
Buck up! “Without the advertising budgets of major houses, the smaller presses have more difficulty finding readers, Mr. Nelson said, and the idea behind the library was to form a community of people who could share books that were not easy to find elsewhere.” Meet Mellow Pages Library of Bushwick. 
Iain Banks, who announced last week that he is dying of cancer, married his long-term partner at Inverlochy Castle Hotel in the Scottish Highlands. As he put it, he asked if she would “do me the honour of becoming my widow.”