Intellectual Pretence: the book most people have lied about reading

Not much compares to getting stuck in a good book. Like discovering a great film or poignant record, stumbling upon a good book is like accidentally coming across a new world where every page turns into an even more intriguing doorway. Some books are so heavily ingrained in the culture that it’s difficult to unveil when they became so popular, almost like they were presented to us at birth. Others carry the kind of importance that makes some pretend they’ve read them at all.

Embellishing certain things here and there to seem embedded in the cultural zeitgeist isn’t a new phenomenon; most people do it as part of the watercooler effect to appear as though they are keeping up with trending topics. It’s a familiar scene: nodding along in agreement, offering vague comments about a certain film or book, wondering if all efforts to blend in are worth the possibility of being caught out.

There are many books that might come to mind when it comes to this scenario, many of which are so prolific when it comes to pop culture reference that it’s almost always easy to get away with faking knowledge. These might be George Orwell’s 1984, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, and the list goes on.

This is the same for films, too. How many times have you heard someone claim to have seen Fight Club, The Godfather, Citizen Kane, or Psycho and felt slight doubt about whether they have actually let those movies run long enough to gauge the plot? Moreover, how many times have you heard someone claim to enjoy those movies? It’s difficult to believe anyone who says their favourite movie of all time is Pulp Fiction, regardless of whether they have seen it or if it is objectively a good movie or not.

This trend might make it easy to predict which book is the one most people claim to have read when they haven’t ever picked up a copy. There are so many to choose from, but according to a Sky Arts survey, the actual answer might be different to what you think. The research says that the most lied-about book is actually Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland, followed by 1984, Pride and Prejudice, and a handful of others that might be a little more expected than Lewis Caroll’s children’s classic.

Others include J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Anna Karenina, Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, JD Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, E.L. James’ Fifty Shades trilogy, Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird, Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield, Anne Frank’s The Diary of Anne Frank, and many more.

Clearly, there’s a pattern, as many of these are classics, meaning that most people likely feel the need to lie about books they have read in an effort to seem interested or involved in the more sophisticated literary classics. The survey, which analysed the reading behaviours of 2,000 Britons, also found that people are more likely to read a copy of original texts when presented with a television adaptation, proving that visual aid often encourages extended intrigue.

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