Ever Lie About a Book You've Read?

There is a recent Reuters article that reports many have lied about certain book titles they've read, mostly just because they were trying to impress those they were speaking to.

Although the article picks on the British specifically, this is not a culture-restricted "crime." Just read the reviews of many published critics and one can easily see that they don't read the books they're being paid to review either, but that's another topic.

Surprisingly, the article mentioned that the number 1 book people lied about reading was Orwell's "1984." I found this shocking since it's a pretty fast and easy read.

Other titles include Flaubert's "Madame Bovary" Tolstoy's "War and Peace," Joyce's "Ulysses" and Proust's "In Remembrance of Things Past."

As for my own experiences, I've not read "Ulysses" but I've read both "Dubliners" and "Portrait of an Artist." I much enjoyed "Madame Bovary" more so than Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina."

"War and Peace" I found a slog, though I managed to make it 160 pages in.

Yet I must admit that many of the books that people include as their "guilty pleasures" I don't find any interest in. "The Da Vinci Code" was an absolute bore. If you can't intrigue me with words, the dull plot is pointless.

I am familiar with Proust, but know more of Thomas Wolfe, (I've now read 3 of his novels). My conclusion is that Wolfe is a great writer but not necessarily a great novelist per se, for even though many of his books can be argued as great, I still think they would have benefited from some trimming. His strengths lie in his description and settings.

I've spent much of my time over the past several years trying to familiarize myself with many of the classics that I might not have gotten to first time around. I read Kafka in high school, but Hesse as an adult. Twain's "Huck Finn" and "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" I both read as an adult. And it was fun to reread Kafka as an adult. Didn't get to "Catcher in the Rye" till I was 22, and "Madame Bovary" I read at the age of 28 or 29.

There's nothing wrong with admitting you've not read something. I read Dreiser for the first time this year, as well as Frank Norris. I read Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath" in high school and loved it (I still can't understand why anyone wouldn't) and I think I've read it now 4 times total.

Though there are still plenty of books on my "to read" pile: "Middlemarch" is one of them as well as Crane's "The Red Badge of Courage," among others. Happily, I've discovered new great writers like Richard Yates a number of years ago, as well as Ishiguro.

I've always said that being "well read" is nothing to boast about. It's knowing how to read well that counts. Anyone can be "well read" by merely namedropping and quoting randomly-to read well means one understands and has taken something from the reading experience. That's what literature is all about, after all, not some laundry list of titles. And anyway, I think everyone should reread those books they were forced to read in high school and see how they fit as an adult. That's the key word: forced. It takes away all the fun.

Just knowing you are reading because you want to and not with some professor looming over you with a quiz can make all the difference.