The Books Everyone Lies About Having Read

Posted on February 3, 2016

The BBC took a poll to see which books people lied about having read. The BBC often turns classic literature into miniseries, which are quite popular. The Telegraph reports that many people lie about having read the book that was the basis of a movie or television series so they can join in the conversation and appear intelligent. So what is the top book that people lie about reading? It's Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, which we find mind-boggling.

The rest the top ten most lied about books include:

1984 by George Orwell
The Lord Of The Rings trilogy by JRR Tolkien
War And Peace by Leo Tolstoy
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
The Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle
To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
Crime And Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Pride And Prejudice by Jane Austen

We can't imagine why anyone would pretend to have read Alice in Wonderland instead of just reading it. It's hilarious, it's easy to read -- what's the big deal? War and Peace we understand. There are some other odd selections in the top twenty, including the Harry Potter books by J.K. Rowling and the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy by EL James. We would have thought most people would be trying to pretend they hadn't read Fifty Shades of Grey rather than pretending that they had.

The rest of the top twenty are not as surprising. Titles people regularly pretend they have read include Bleak House by Charles Dickens, Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, The Diary Of Anne Frank by Anne Frank, Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens, And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie, The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald, Catch 22 by Joseph Heller and The Catcher In The Rye by JD Salinger.

This is a British poll, so perhaps that explains the extreme shame at not having read Agatha Christie, JK Rowling or any of Charles Dickens' works. It's interesting that no one even pretends to have read James Joyce -- no doubt because of the unlikelihood that the BBC is going to do a miniseries based on Finnegans Wake. Although the book might soon make the list due to a groundbreaking and much buzzed about new reading of the unabridged text which was set to music by various artists. You read more about that project here.