I Read Therefore I Am discussion
Books and Reading
>
Top 10 most lied about books?
date
newest »
newest »
Which of these books have you read and have you ever claimed to have read a book that you haven't?
I've read all except for War & Peace - which I tried and failed (all the characters have at least 3 names and I had no idea of who was doing what to whom) , Crime and Punishment (in my TBR pile) and A Passage to India - which I've never really fancied.
I think the only times I've lied about reading books are when people have given me books which really aren't my cup of tea as presents and then kept asking me if I've finished yet and what I thought of them.
I've read all except for War & Peace - which I tried and failed (all the characters have at least 3 names and I had no idea of who was doing what to whom) , Crime and Punishment (in my TBR pile) and A Passage to India - which I've never really fancied.
I think the only times I've lied about reading books are when people have given me books which really aren't my cup of tea as presents and then kept asking me if I've finished yet and what I thought of them.
Mod
It's a bit sad that people feel they would have to lie about what they have and haven't read to look intelligent though isn't it?
I am ashamed to admit I've only read two, Pride & Prejudice and Nineteen Eighty-Four, and that latter only a couple of weeks ago!
No need to feel ashamed - it's the people who lie about reading them that should feel, well maybe not ashamed but at least embarrassed.
Laurel, have you tried Howards End? - that's the only Forster book I've tried that I like.
Laurel, have you tried Howards End? - that's the only Forster book I've tried that I like.
Mod
Lee it was Where Angels Fear to Tread that I read so I might give some of his other's a try. His writing was ok but I didn't really care for the story or the characters but Howards End does look better.
I think it helped that I saw the film (Howards End) first - Emma Thompson and Anthony Hopkins made their characters very believable and sympathetic
I've read 5 of them. I'm surprised The Bible isn't in the top ten, because I know people who say they have read it, but I doubt they have read it all...
Perhaps no one dares admit to lying about reading the Bible!
Lee wrote: "Perhaps no one dares admit to lying about reading the Bible!"Ha ha, maybe you're right!
I've read all of them except Passage to India, which I did start but never got interested in and so never went back to.Are you ready for this, it's my claim to fame! I read Crime and Punishment when I was 11. Yes, honestly! I read it slowly, and although the teacher who saw me wouldn't believe me, I could understand it and enjoy it.
I thought one of the books that everyone lied about reading was A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking, which I have read but found hard going at times.
Mod
Which leads me to ask... What was everyone's first really big difficult book that they read?
@ Hilary - re A Brief History of Time - I thought that too - perhaps they asked people which novels they'd lied about reading - that would explain the absence of the Bible as well
@ Laurel - that's a difficult one - I'll have to think a bit
Mod
1st big difficult book I read? I think it was Villette and I was 16/17 - still one of my favourite books - I think I get more out of it every time I read it.
I'm really struggling with this one. My parents were great readers and my reading was never censored at all so i read a lot of adult (not the modern meaning!!!) books when i was quite young. Strangely enough Crime and Punishment has stuck in my mind not because it was a classic or difficult, although it was, but because it was the first book I remember buying with my own money. It was a paperback and I bought it because the title sounded exciting. I remember reading Ivanhoe and finding that hard going but my clearest memory is of reading The Little World of Don Camillo by Giovanni Guereschi(?) which I fell in love with, probably aged about 9, and read over and over again. Happy days!
It's great to grow up in a house with loads of books - isn't it - Villette came from my Dads bookshelves as did a lot of my first "grown up" reads. Sadly he is mainly into Sci Fi , which is not really my cup of tea so I had to find my own way through the world of reading .
theguardian.com, Monday 9 September 2013
Big Brother knows you gave up on page 17... Nineteen Eighty-Four is the most fibbed-about book.
A recent survey of 2,000 people suggests that the majority of people pretend to have read classic books in order to appear more intelligent, with more than half of those polled displaying unread books on their shelves and 3% slipping a highbrow cover on books they'd rather not be seen reading in public.
The books most likely to be lied about are, naturally, the books most often filmed, talked about and studied in school (some of the respondents must have been lying since GCSE onwards). Are any of them in your pretend-I've-read/never-finished pile, or do you save your literary fibbing for Finnegans Wake and Infinite Jest? Share your guilty secrets below.
The top 10 books people claim to read but haven't
1 1984 by George Orwell (26%)
2 War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (19%)
3 Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (18%)
4 The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger (15%)
5 A Passage to India by EM Forster (12%)
6 Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien (11%)
7 To Kill A Mocking Bird by Harper Lee (10%)
8 Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky (8%)
9 Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (8%)
10 Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte (5%)