According to this book post at The Guardian, many people claim to have read books that they haven’t. Here is the list of books that people most often pretend to have read.
- Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
- War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
- Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
- The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
- A Passage to India by E.M. Forster
- Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
- To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
- Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
- Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
- Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
I used to pretend to read books in high school, but that was so I wouldn’t get in trouble with the teachers who had assigned the books. I wouldn’t dream of lying about my reading now. I suppose it helps that I’ve read 7 of the 10 in that list.
But go ahead and ask me about Infinite Jest, which was also mentioned in the post. I haven’t read that book, and I probably never will. Oh, yes, everyone says it’s so wonderful and that David Foster Wallace was such a genius. And maybe he was. But I tried a sample of it on my Kindle a few months ago, and the first page seemed to take forever. I couldn’t connect with the text, and I had to keep going back to try to figure out what I was missing. That’s not my idea of fun. I gave up.
But I have read hundreds of other books (over 300 since I started keeping track in 2007). Maybe they weren’t all long and complex, and maybe they weren’t all what one might call Profound. But they did all, in their own way, contain pieces of Truth and Beauty. Some of them made me laugh. Some of them made me cry. Some of them inspired me to be a better person. I am better for having read them, all of them.
So don’t lie about what you read. Just read. And to Hell with what other people think about your reading choices.