Lies

A recent survey of British readers found that “George Orwell’s 1984 tops the list of books that people pretend to have read in a survey carried out for World Book Day 2009.

Of the 65% who claimed to have read a book, 42% admit to having said they had read the modern classic without having actually read it.

Those who lied have claimed to have read:

1. 1984 by George Orwell (42%)
2. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (31%)
3. Ulysses by James Joyce (25%)
4. The Bible (24%)
5. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (16%)
6. A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking (15%)
7. Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (14%)
8. In Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust (9%)
9. Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama (6%)
10. The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins (6%)

I’m curious about what the list would look like if American readers were surveyed.

As for me, I have read 1984 and The Bible and have attempted to read War and Peace and Ulysses without success.