Think you're well-read? Take our World Lit quiz

Sure, you can impress the members of your local book club. But how well read are you, really? Would your book knowledge stand up in a bracing World Lit 101 classroom discussion? The following questions are based on a core cluster of internationally renowned literary titles that appear again and again on the must-read lists of many of America's top colleges. Have you read them? Do you remember them?  (Warning: Spoilers and challenging questions abound!)

51. Who gave the heroine of Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice" this piece of advice?

“An unhappy alternative is before you, Elizabeth. From this day, you must be a stranger to one of your parents.”

Mrs. Phillips

Mr. Gardiner

Mr. Bennet

Mrs. Bennet

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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