Have you ever been deep in a discussion about literature when a nagging thought creeps in: "Did this person genuinely finish that book?" They rattle off the title, the author, the characters — sometimes even sketch out the plot. Push for any deeper insight, though, and it becomes painfully obvious the novel in question has never been cracked open. Admittedly, plenty of us have done the same — tossing out the name of an author whose work we've only skimmed via a summary or caught on screen. What fuels this compulsion to exaggerate, and which books top the list of titles we brag about without ever reading?
The BBC was curious about the same phenomenon. Once the screen version of Tolstoy's "War and Peace" aired, the network set out to determine how many viewers had bothered with the original. A poll involving two thousand British bookstore-goers revealed that roughly a quarter had lied about completing a literary masterpiece. The explanation is straightforward — projecting the image of a cultured reader makes a person far more appealing in conversation. Beyond that, many feel embarrassed about confessing they've never engaged with a renowned text.
From the results, researchers managed to assemble a ranking of twenty titles that people falsely claim to have read. Notably, the list wasn't restricted to weighty, dense novels like "War and Peace" — lighter popular fiction such as "Fifty Shades of Gray" also made the cut.
So, most often people lie that they read books such as:
- "Alice in Wonderland". Lewis Carroll.
- "1984". George Orwell.
- The Lord of the Rings trilogy. J.R. R. Tolkien.
- "War and Peace". Lev Tolstoy.
- "Anna Karenina." Lev Tolstoy.
- "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes". Arthur Conan Doyle.
- "To Kill a Mockingbird". Harper Lee.
- "David Copperfield." Charles Dickens.
- "Crime and Punishment". Fedor Dostoevsky.
- "Pride and Prejudice". Jane Austen.
- "Cold house." Charles Dickens.
- A series of books about Harry Potter. Joanne Rowling.
- "Big hopes". Charles Dickens.
- "The Diary of Anne Frank." Anna Frank
- "Oliver Twist". Charles Dickens.
- "Fifty Shades of Gray". E.L. James.
- "Ten Little Indians." Agatha Christie.
- "The Great Gatsby". Francis Scott Fitzgerald.
- "Trick-22." Joseph Heller
- "Over Abyss in the Rye". Jerome Salinger.
Since the research was carried out solely in Britain, it's impossible to gauge how prevalent this dishonesty is elsewhere — how many residents of the USA or other nations casually reference celebrated authors whose works they've never actually explored.
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