2nd November 2026 - The Autumn Big Reader's Quiz is now officially closed to my automated marking system (and to prize entries and the just giving charity link). You can still do the quiz for fun using the links to the google gallery of questions and the books lists with the set of possible answers, found further down the page, and you can mark it yourself from a new 2026 quiz answers page, which is now published in the drop down menu from the "Home" menu on the top right of this page.
Once you've done as much quizing and marking as you want to, you might be interested in the following conversation I had with Chat-GPT about this quiz and how it responded to the questions. It dives into the theory and practice and there are spoilers, so something for when you're done.
Chat-GPT discusses the quiz
Back by popular demand, here's a second edition of my book themed picture quiz/game which you might enjoy. It is open to everyone who has reached this page. This means you!
It's pictures. It's book titles. Nothing more complicated. You don't need to have read the books to connect the pictures to the titles, because the pictures are based on the titles alone (more about this below), although some very limited general knowledge might help at the margins, just with the odd question or two. Everyone should be able to give it a go, and will have the same chance of winning as anyone who has read the books.
Feel free to forward the link to this page to whoever you think might be interested at any time up until midnight on Sunday 1st November. The results will be posted sometime in the following week.
I've put the quiz together in support of the UK reading charity, "The Reading Agency" which seeks to foster improved literacy in a variety of settings. You can find out more about their work here:-
My first picture quiz in 2024 raised £88 for them and it would be great if we could do the same or better this time, so I'd like to encourage everyone who wants to enter, to make a donation to the charity (see details below) and anyone who does that will be eligible for a small mystery prize funded by me when the competition closes on October 31st. If you don't feel willing or able to donate, then you can still take part in the quiz purely for fun, you just won't qualify for the prize.
How to Play
Decide if you want to play just for "fun" or donate to the charity and compete for the prize.
If you are competing, I've set up a "Just Giving" page, which you can find here:-
https://www.justgiving.com/page/david-worton-2?utm_medium=FR&utm_source=CL
I'm suggesting £5 as a minimum entry "fee" but of course you can give more if you want to. Whatever name you use when donating, should match the name you use on the quiz form so I can confirm eligibility for the prize.
The quiz will ask for an email address which is used to ensure there is one entry per email address and so that I can contact the winner at the end to arrange delivery of the prize. The email address is optional. I don't need one if you are playing just for fun.
The questions are at the bottom of this web page and the answer to every one is a picture clue to either a book from the bottom half of a BBC "top 100" list that came from a public vote in the early 2000s, or a book the Southend Big Readers group either have already read in 2025 and 2026, or we will be reading later this year.
All the answers can be found on one of these two links, so the quiz is fair to everybody.
southendbigreaders.info/BBCTopList.aspx
I have used the second page only in this quiz, which is the ones ranked from 51 to 100. I used the first page in my last quiz and this new list is to open up some different options. To see the second page, scroll down to the bottom of the link and click on the "2". You can see you are looking at the right set of books if the BBC Rank column shows numbers between 51 and 100.
southendbigreaders.info/OurChoicesList.aspx
The books our book group has read (or will be reading) in 2025 and 2026 only. These are all on the first page, reading down in reverse date order from the top.
Your job is simply to decide which book from one of those two lists matches each picture question.
Enter the book titles exactly as they are spelt on those web pages (including capital and lower case letters) to give the overly simple marking rules I've attached to each question a chance of scoring your entry correctly. A computer is doing the marking and it won't be as generous as I might be, so I suggest copying and pasting to be sure your spelling matches mine 🙂.
Click submit once you have answered as many questions as you can and final results and answers will be revealed on 1st November. In the event of a tie, the winner will be whoever answered first.
Good luck and have fun!
P.S. This is a quiz not an exam and I am aware that there may be ways to cheat a little, since the quiz gives some feedback. I could have blocked this, but thought it was more interesting for you to leave in. Someone might put in multiple anonymous "fun" entries and use the responses to triangulate the answers before entering a "competitive" one. I'm not saying anyone actually would do that, but if you are thinking about it, all I can say is please don't, since I don't want to lock down the responses further. An attempt like this will show up in the answers I get to review. I can safely assure you that the prize won't be life changing, or worth anything like the loss of your moral integrity 😏.
About the Art Work
As members of the bookgroup have seen since 2024, I've been using a custom Zoom background made for each book with various AI art engines. For those images, I've come up with a description for a scene or an element in the book and then tried to obtain something that's vaguely close to part of the story or at least the theme of it. For this quiz I've done something a little bit different (and much simpler).
Using the title alone with no other words to cue in the AI, I simply asked it to make a number of alternative images for each title and picked the one I liked best. I haven't cheated with any of them by providing any other context for what the images should be, so the AI doesn't necessarily even know they are books, let alone what's in them. I have allowed myself to generate a decent selection of options until I got something I felt would work in the quiz, but often a good one popped out of the first batch.
The interesting thing about creating these pictures, from my perspective, is that where the title is a really well known cultural landmark, the data model is often aware of it and will zero in on the style and content of existing popular representations. These ones, you should hopefully find are easy to identify.
When the title is not so obviously a book and might just be a simple phrase, then the output is some artistic representation of the phrase but won't be specifically connected to the novel (except by accident). For titles like this, you'll have to use your imagination and play a game of "say what you see" as they are going to be more cryptic, but still guessable if you hit on the right idea.
Finally when the title is not well known and more abstract in nature, the output is a free style interpretation that may or may not succeed in capturing some tenuous aspect of the request, but you can certainly be forgiven for not understanding the connection. Good luck with these, they are very hard and it was not always entirely clear even to me (knowing the answer), why the generator, generated what it did, although I did pick images I thought made the most interesting stab at representing the idea implied by the title. Since these questions are particularly difficult and require a combination of lateral thinking and divine inspiration, I've set the quiz to award two points for correct answers of this kind and one point for the easier questions. Each question shows how many points it is worth so you know when they are going to be extra tricky and you shouldn't get too despondent if nothing occurs to you. Just do some free association and make a guess. You might be right!
To get a further idea of what to expect, the answers and my commentary from the 2024 version of the Quiz are available in a drop down link under "Home", on the top right of the page.
With these extra points taken into account, there are sixty questions and a maximum possible score of sixty nine points, which is most unlikely to be achieved. In the event of a tie, whoever sent their answers in first will be the winner.
Some Helpful Quiz Tips
You absolutely do not need a google account to play this quiz, however if you have one, I would recommend signing on to it in your browser via the google home page, if you don't already sign on automatically. This theoretically gives you the benefit of saving your responses on the answer form for up to thirty days before you finally click submit to send them to me, and makes it easier for you to do a few questions at a time and come back for the rest.
Your entry will only count when you click the submit button at the end of the quiz. This causes the questions to collapse and the bottom of the page then appears blank, but if you scroll up you will see a confirmation that your entry has been accepted and some feedback on how many points you scored.
I would also strongly advise everyone to keep your own independent record of the answers somewhere else and then go through and enter and submit them all in one go when you are finished (just in case form preservation doesn't work for you).
To help with this I have set up a google album with all the images here:-
Bookgroup 2026 Quiz - Google Photos
These show up at a bigger scale where they are easier to view at your leisure outside the answer form and they are in the same order as the questions on the answer form. If you click any image and show the details, each one has the number of the question in the image file name.
You will want to look at the list of possible answers frequently, so to help out with that I have also made a google sheet template with all the qualifying books, listed and a column where you can mark up the question number, when you think you know an answer. This only works if you have a google account (but read on for more help if you don't). Here is how to use it if you are signed on to your own google account:-
How to use the template answer sheet:
Click the link provided: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1GkuFPPEZXQJubYgylUUqLYR3cSWZ15RE8usgoIZpijo/copy
A page will open asking if you want to make a copy. Click the blue Make a copy button.
A new, editable version of the spreadsheet will open in your Google Drive. You can now edit, update, and customize your personal copy freely without altering the original master template. Use it to keep track of your answers before you save them in the form below.
For anyone who doesn't have a google account for whatever reason (and I respect all of them, even though I find my google account incredibly useful), if you have a microsoft office account, I also have an Excel version of the above sheet.
You can download a copy in Excel format from this link:-
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1rkxcPvBFvah4-LWTqL8lTOEwfeapBzIK/export?format=xlsx
A final word of warning and some food for thought. The answers in this quiz are objective. Every image included was genuinely created from the title in the answer and only from that title, with no human intervention from me apart from actually selecting the image. There was no cheating. However, it's built into the very nature of this kind of "quiz" that the resulting images will be inherently ambiguous and not reversable to a unique answer. You may come up with a better interpretation of some image than the "correct" one. That's why a list of possible answers is provided, to narrow down the options. It won't always help enough. That's when you'll need lucky guesses. If getting questions wrong annoys you and you want something that rewards precise derivation over subjective interpretation, then this "quiz" is not for you!
Still, I'd stress again that the "true" answers are definitive and you either get them right or not, regardless of how unclear they might appear to you. And there is always some logic behind them if you are inituitive enough to latch on to the right idea. I find that intriguing and if you are also comfortable with exploring the boundaries of subjectivity, then I think you'll have fun pitting your wits against the image generators.
Just to reassure you all, I gave this quiz to ChatGPT. The analysis was fascinating. It was in the same boat as you (it had nothing to do with generating the images which it had never seen) and it scored 38 out of a possible 69. I think that is beatable but it also shows that you shouldn't expect to get everything right. ChatGPT got most of the "obvious" ones. In some cases its reasoning was weak, though and I think a human would do better. Prove me right! In other cases it did come up with answers that were at least as good as the correct one and arguably better. It also, impressively, pulled a couple of the difficult ones out of the bag. All I can say about that is that you are all in the same boat, and all's fair in image interpretation! Have fun!