62% Person of lie about having read classic books

[Sixshells]

A Passage to India by E M Forster – No (funny how many here haven't heard of it. It can't really be a

Which begs the question of why are so many people bothering to lie about having read it to the point it is in the top 10, then?

[Seli]

If they'd switched A Passage To India (not read) with A Room With A View (read for school) I wonder how many of you would still be saying you'd never heard of it?

The latter was also made into a film at least once, there was one with HBC I think.

While I knew of -and might have read- A Passage to India, I don't remember having heard of A Room With A View :dunno: .

[deleted01]

I read and enjoyed Great Expectations and Jane Eyre for school/college, and read Pride and Prejudice for the same reason and absolutely loathed it.

I've read 1984 outside of education and loved it, and I recently bought To Kill a Mockingbird. LoTR has never appealed to me - I vaguely remember the films and thought they were okay, but not enough to make me want to read the books. Maybe one day.

[thenedstark]

Maybe Brits have some cultural pressure to appear well read in classic English literature, I'm not aware of any pressure for Americans to do so on a national level. Personally I'd be pretty honest about what I've read among the classics. I have read Dickens, Orwell, Dostoevsky, Dumas and Tolkien, but it was quite a while back.

[mankytoes]

Really? I think it's the most obvious one for the list in retrospec. It's a book everyone likes to quote and reference. The name has become synonymous with "government surveillance". But given how few people are likely to have read any of these, it's no surprise people lie about it.

Yeah, I guess it has introduced a lot of phrases, people might use them, then feel embarrassed to say they haven't read it if called out on it.

I just heard, say, War and Peace is a very hard read, and 1984 is a pretty easy one. Maybe people assume it'll be more complex.

[The Marquis de Leech]

Of that lot, I've read 1984 (thoroughly disliked it on first read - Orwell is far too heavy-handed sometimes), War and Peace (took me six months), A Passage to India (the forecast of impending European War was downright creepy), and, of course, LOTR, which I fell in love with aged 8.

Have never read Great Expectations. My Dickens is limited to A Tale of Two Cities and Martin Chuzzlewit. Though I keep meaning to actually read A Christmas Carol...

[Masonity]

I've only read 1984 and Lord of the Rings from that list. Both were of my own free choice and in no way school reading though.

My school had an absolute hard on for Steinberg, and I personally have an immense dislike for the man's writing. And that's not just because we were forced to read it, I hated The Pearl but enjoyed other short stories and novellas we read, and absolutely detested Of Mice and Men. We were also forced to read Animal Farm, yet I found it pretty good and actually chose to read 1984 as a result, so definitely not just a backlash against compulsory reading.

Lord of the Rings couldn't have been forced on me. I read it when I was 10/11 (read the first half of Fellowship at 10, then had an adult relative who was in prison "borrow" it for almost a year), back when compulsory school reading was more "Spot the Dog" and the analysis was "he can read bigger words".

[Migey]

I have read exactly 100 pages of Great Expectations (as much as was required) before throwing it angrily to the floor and saying "No. Fuck this". I am proud to have never completed a Dickens novel.

And now I discover I have to read and study the full thing and Hard Times for the English course I'm doing, Fuck right off.

Of that list, I have read only 1984 (very recently, as it is one of the books I am going to be writing about in my English Dissertation). None of the others, although the Fellowship of the Ring is at the tail end of my 20 + book long tbr pile.

[thecryptile]

Why would anyone lie about reading 1984? That book is depressing as fuck. I read it whenever I feel like taking a dump on humanity. Needless to say I've read it countless times.

lol... Yup, nothin' cheers you up better than reading about rat torture in a totalitarian dystopia. Animal Farm is even more depressing IMO.

tried reading LOTR, read till that part where they meet strider, got bored then and left it. The movies kinda ruined them for me cause I already knew the whole story.

The story you know is different from the books. There are more differences than there are between GoT and ASOIAF. For instance-

The battles are totally different- the Elves don't show up to help at the Battle of the Hornburg, and Saruman doesn't blow up the Deeping Wall.

A Passage to India by E M Forster - No (funny how many here haven't heard of it. It can't really be a classic, can it, if almost no-one has heard of it

QFT

I only know about Forster because his "The Machine Stops" is in "The Treasury of Classic Science Fiction".

[wolverine]

I'll give you Faulker, but Steinbeck is amazing! Bite your tongue!

The problem is kids are forced to read The Grapes of Wrath in school and it is insanely boring. If they had them read stuff like Of Mice and Men that would be entirely different. I am somewhat amazed that the same guy wrote both books.

From the original list I have read:

Great Expectations (liked it quite a bit at the time)

Catcher in the Rye (about 30 pages when I was waiting for something and the books was around. Hayden Caulfield annoyed me enough that I did not want to read the whole thing, but I did read a summary to see what the rest was about.)

LoTR (The Fellowship actually bored me quite a bit, but the next two were both very enjoyable)

The Brothers Karamazov instead of Crime and Punishment (I don't think that counts but after reading that I don't plan on anymore Dostoyevsky)

[Isis]

I do find LOTR to be out of place on that list. I actually find it bizarre that anyone would pretend to have read it. Seems like those I've met who haven't read it are pretty unrepentant about it.

I started Crime and Punishment about, oh, 19 years ago and still keep meaning to return to it.

Dickens and I have never ever gotten on. I doubt I will ever finish one of his books. I did start Great Expectations once though.

Only ever read bits and pieces of the Bible. There was nobody in my life who made me read it and I generally found it dull whenever I tried to do it from start to finish.

I've read these:

1984

Catcher in the Rye

Lord of the Rings

To Kill A Mockingbird

Pride and Prejudice

Homer’s Odyssey

Wuthering Heights

I think that Holden Caulfield comes up often enough in popular culture that it does pay to have read Catcher in the Rye... but as I think someone mentioned already, you should really read it as a teenager otherwise I doubt it's going to come across as much of a 'classic'.

Dearie me, there are some sad individuals out there. Why do people care so very much about what other people think?

The more dedicated members of the surveyed group (three per cent) even admit to hiding the low brow magazines and books they are reading inside publications which make them appear more intelligent.

[flinn]

The only classic books I have read are those forced upon me by the school system.

If I hadn't been brought up reading, and that was my introduction to reading, I would not be a reader today.

It is easy for me to understand why most people consider reading to be a chore. Their only experiences reading novels came from the bullcrap forced upon them at school.

[Tears of Lys]

Then again I may be lying about that as well. I wonder how many people lie about not having read books though? Sales for the Da vinci code, Twilight and 50 shades of grey can't all be from people proud to admit it?

I think you're on to something here.

[Centrist Simon Steele]

Oh I remember when I was a freshman in high school and they had us read like a 150 page, abridged version of Great Expectations. My dad had the whole book at our house and I remember reading it that summer because I really loved the story. And when I finished the full version I sat down and read it again. I loved that story. It hit me in the right place at the right time.

To Kill a Mockingbird was another, and might be one of my favorites ever. Atticus Finch is like Ned Stark--way too honorable for the world he lived in.

I just bought Crime and Punishment and the Idiot and I am looking forward to those, as Notes from the Underground totally sucked me in last year--read it in two days. Very dark and uncomfortable. Like when the narrator crashes the party.

Lord of the Rings I won't lie about--I've read the first two books many times, but never could make it through Return of the King. I always finished Frodo's half but the war half bored the shit out of me the way it was written. So happy a movie finally came out to show me what happened.

War and Peace I want to read but haven't yet. I tried the Death of Ivan Ilyich, but it didn't sit with me. I might not have been in the right frame of mind for it.

Never read Pride and Prejudice but I did read a bit of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies until one of my students stole it from me.

[Rorshach]

Which begs the question of why are so many people bothering to lie about having read it to the point it is in the top 10, then?

That's a good question.

It might be a British thing, and if so, I won't understand it anyway.. :dunno:

[Centrist Simon Steele]

The problem is kids are forced to read The Grapes of Wrath in school and it is insanely boring. If they had them read stuff like Of Mice and Men that would be entirely different. I am somewhat amazed that the same guy wrote both books.

Steinbeck is another I loved. I read Of Mice and Men in high school, and Grapes of Wrath and Cannery Row for fun while in college. He is one of the best. I never was a good history student, but Grapes of Wrath brought the Great Depression to life for me. That's what my grandfather and his family lived through--they were able to somehow hold onto their land in Oklahoma while so many others were forced to leave. It made me feel closer to my family to read that novel, my grandfather's brothers and sisters seem to hold that book very close to a sacred text.

[Summah]

1984 by George Orwell – Yes, several times

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy – Yes, it took me a couple years though, I would read a few hundred pages, get bored/frustrated, put it down for several months, then when I picked it up again I'd have to skim through what I read before, read another few hundred etc.

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens – I don't think so, but maybe, I had to read Dickens in school (Tale of two cities, for sure), but didn't like him and never read anything I wasn't required to.

Catcher in the Rye by J D Salinger – Yes for school

A Passage to India by E M Forster – Yes, unfortunately, I really don't like reading novels about colonies written by colonialists. I did like A room with a view, Howard's End and Maurice though.

Lord of the Rings by J R R Tolkein – Yes, but it was difficult (I don't like Tolkein's style of writing), I wouldn't reread them.

To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee – Yes for school

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky – Yes for a class and I do not like Dostoyevsky

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen – Yes, many times along with her other novels and partially completed novels. I think the film adaptations of P&P are boring and miss a lot the points of the novel, by over romanticizing everything. P&P is a love story, yes, but it's a lot more than that.

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë – Yes, don't like the Brontë's

[Sci-2]

I think you're on to something here.

Nah, people genuinely enjoy Twilight and Da Vinci code. 50 shades, well for some it's auto-erotic stimulation so they may hide that.

But then there are probably people on a Proust forum wondering about people proud to read GRRM....and we should find them and intimidate those scar[f] wearing weaklings into taking back their insults. :devil:

[Snowborn]

From the list, I've read 1984 (liked it, loved the oppressive feeling of it), Lord of the Rings (which is probably my favorite book series of all times, I've read LotR, The Silmarillion and The Hobbit many times), Crime and Punishment (Dostoievski is one of my favorite writers, I've also read The Brothers Karamazov, The Demons, The Double, and some others), Pride and Prejudice (I loved that book when I was a teenager, I also read Sense and Sensibility) and Jane Eyre (which I liked).

Never heard of A Passage to India, and I only heard about To Kill a Mockingbird this year, in this forum.

One Hundred Years of Solitude, Boquitas pintadas, Hopscotch, Don Quixote, The Slaughterhouse, Martín Fierro, Ficciones... those are the classics in this side of the world I think, judging from what we read in school. From that list I haven't read Ficciones, Don Quixote (only a children's version) and The Slaughterhouse.

[Plessiez]

I've read all of these multiple times because I'm just so incredibly intelligent and sophisticated. Oh, wait.

1984 - yes

War and Peace - yes

Great Expectations - yes

Catcher in the Rye - no

A Passage to India - no

Lord of the Rings - yes

To Kill A Mockingbird - no

Crime and Punishment - yes

Pride and Prejudice - yes

Jane Eyre - yes

(Can't remember the exact age I read most of them. But I was no older than 12 when I first read Lord of the Rings, I read Pride and Prejudice a couple of years ago and I read all the others at some point in my teens.)

In the interest of (cultivating a reputation for) honesty, I should probably note that I only read Jane Eyre because I was expected to at school and I can't actually remember a thing about it. Similarly Pride and Prejudice is the only Austen I've read, and I think Great Expectations is the only Dickens I've read -- it's certainly the only Dickens I've ever reread.

Agree with those who think Lord of the Rings looks a bit out of place on this list. At least a few years ago it was a point of pride for lots of people never to have read it. It seems a bit odd that somebody would lie about having read it in order to appear "well read", but maybe that's just me. Not surprised at all to see 1984 on the list though. Presumably if the topic was "books you quote from in order to appear fashionably cynical but haven't actually ever read" the figures would be even higher.

Slightly bemused by one line from the article though:

Surprisingly, half of the adults questioned admit to having displayed books on their shelves without ever having read them.

I don't understand why this is supposed to be surprising, since it covers both "people who buy books merely to put them on the shelves to impress visitors" and "people who buy or borrow more than one book at a time and need somewhere to put the ones they can't start straight away". I own lots of books I haven't read yet. That doesn't mean I have no intention of reading them and it seems a weird thing to conflate with "lying about books you've read".

My school had an absolute hard on for Steinberg, and I personally have an immense dislike for the man's writing. And that's not just because we were forced to read it, I hated The Pearl but enjoyed other short stories and novellas we read, and absolutely detested Of Mice and Men.

I can't actually prove that my high school English classes were expressly designed to make everyone involved hate Of Mice and Men for the rest of their lives, but it certainly wouldn't surprise me.