Guess a book by its content

[Lext]

This book has someone like that, although perhaps in the wrong country:

The power of one?

[Liselott]

No 1 lady detective agency ?

[Abcdarian]

Liselott wrote: "No 1 lady detective agency ?"

We have a winner! The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency First of a series of gentle, peaceful books, having very little relation to other detective stories. Have you read it Liselott, or just heard of it?

[Liselott]

It has been on my shelf for years now. That was the reason I nominated it for mysterious may! ;) is it my turn now?? :)))

[Liselott]

I think it is... Ha ha ok . I think this one is quite easy...
' I'm a parasite and my name originates from a slow moving verb

[Abcdarian]

Liselott wrote: "It has been on my shelf for years now. That was the reason I nominated it for mysterious may! ;) is it my turn now?? :)))"
Aagh; I must read other threads more often or more carefully. ;-)

Your clue is totally mysterious, speaking of!

[Liselott]

It is a fiction by the way...
My name is a synonym for a person that travels aimlessly...

[Liselott]

We are parasitic aliens called 'souls' that have invaded Earth...

[Lext]

Well, the only aliens I know are the tri-pod, a verb that travels slowly is to crawl, and a person that travels aimlessly is a vagabond. I can't see they have anything in common :)

[Liselott]

Ok my name is wanderer and I got my name because of the number of planets I have lived on, Having never settled on one I truly liked. I'm later to have the nick name Wanda.

[Lext]

This sounds like one
of the books in the hitchhiker's guide series. Is it?

[Melanti]

Sorry, Liselott - I broke down and googled it, and though I've heard of the book and the author is pretty popular, I've never read anything by her.

[Abcdarian]

Same here.

[Liselott]

Sorry Lext, no.
Melanti, I think you got it, the author is a female and she wrote this one after a very famous ya saga. This one however is an adult sci-fi novel. It was adapted into a movie which was not at all good as the book. Far from it.

[Lext]

I've always thought that for this game search is allowed, at least after a couple of days when hope is fading and new clues have been added. I'd much rather we (everyone else) do that than for the setter to keep entering clues until it becomes trivial, or to give up altogether and just provide the answer.

Also , to search well on a vague clue is an art in itself. Some clues are pretty much search-resistant, if not search-proof.

[Liselott]

Ok, won't say another beep. My lips are sealed. *_* until you beg me... ;)))

[Lext]

Oh, actually what I tried to say was that Melanti should just go ahead and tell us what she found :) There's no need to take yourself out if you searched for it...

[Melanti]

Okay then... The Host by Stephenie Meyer.
I actually attempted to read her Twilight a couple of times but never managed to get very far.


For the next clue - here's one in honor of it being Easter weekend.

This is a poem that proves a snowball has an excellent chance of surviving in hell.

[Liselott]

I never tried the Twilight saga myself. I liked the Host though...

Wow, the new clue is something...

[Melanti]

I guess I should qualify that the snowball has the best chance at surviving if it's a traitor?

A movie partially inspired by this poem involved multiple scenes with everything made out of paint.

[Lext]

Melanti wrote: "Okay then... The Host by Stephenie Meyer.."

Oh dear. I actually watched this movie before. But the stuff with the name Wanda and the planet wandering was just a tiny tiny bit of disclosure at the end that it didn't really register at all until I saw the answer. If I had read the book I think I would have remembered more. That's the thing with books and movies: with books you have to read, process and digest the information, so the facts stay (or are much more likely to stay). With movies you're spoon-fed everything in a constant stream, and you brain typically only remembers what is most important, most surprising or most shocking details. When I think of The Host the movie, all I remember (without prompting) was the alien girl with the differently colored eyes, who eventually chose to stay with the humans somehow.

[Melanti]

The poet's vision of hell, purgatory and heaven is meant to parallel the story of Jesus's decent into hell (harrowing) and ascent into heaven over the course of Easter weekend.

(No one has ever attempted to claim that the poet didn't have a huge ego.)

[Lext]

This is a crapshoot but... Dante's inferno?

[Melanti]

Well, I was thinking of the entire The Divine Comedy but I'll accept just the first section since at least half of my clues came from that bit.

(And thanks for taking the crapshoot! I was sure it would have been guessed just from my first clue (not too many poems about hell) and was getting a bit worried.)

[Lext]

I think I know why. Although that poem is well-known, I'm not sure if many actually read it or know all the details. I for one didn't. All I know is that it's about a journey through hell, and it's called "Inferno". And inferno means a fiery place in English. So with the first clue I think everyone already automatically excludes that most well-known poem about hell. When I saw the first clue, I was thinking of a poem about something spiteful, something impossible and won't ever happen, as in "this can't happen unless hell freezes over". (Again that comparison is only possible because everyone thinks hell is a really hot and fiery place).

But as it turns out (after you told me Melanti, I went and read about it), the deepest circle of hell is an icy icy place. And Inferno in Italian just means "hell", it certainly doesn't have these connotations about fire and hot temperature at all. Isn't it amazing? That English-speaking people attributing additional layer of meaning of X into a foreign word for X?

[Lext]

This is the next one:

Remember the movie Moulin Rouge? The central character in this book is one such girl. She was not just any Can-Can girl, of course, she was the star of the night(s). She fell in love, poor girl, but due to an interference had to make the greatest sacrifice of a person in love. That earned the wrath of her lover, which then gave her the ultimate torture. The ending was tragic and the final scene extremely heart-breaking. I read this book when I was little, and have always remembered the profound impact that ending had on me.

What book is this?

[Melanti]

Lext wrote: "I think I know why. Although that poem is well-known, I'm not sure if many actually read it or know all the details. ..."

Maybe I have a skewed perspective. I've had it as assigned reading 4 or 5 times! Twice in high school and two or three times in college. I just assumed that most people had at least read excerpts of it.

There are a couple of places in the poem where hell is very hot and fiery but, yes, down at the very deepest part where Satan is, it is really cold... Since it's such the opposite of what we envision hell to be, it made that particular canto really memorable for me.

That part about the translation is neat. I looked up the etymology. Inferno comes from the Latin word "infernus" which means "of the lower regions. Wictionary notes that its English definition of a large fire comes as a reference to traditional ideas of hellfire.



Your clue sounds really, really familiar... Let me think about it for a bit.

[Lext]

I'll be on a trip for the next few days, so let me add something now, and if no one has worked out the book by then I'll disclose it:

This was a classic written in the 19th century, by the son in a father-son duo (who were both writers) of the same name. It's actually in our bookshelf right now.

[Lext]

It's this one here: Camille. It's in our current bookshelf, but the original french name is "lady of the camelias" La Dame aux Camélias

I think I should add it to the poll at some point :)