Guilty Secrets Survey results revealed!

George Orwell’s 1984 tops the list of books that people pretend they have read, in a survey carried out for World Book Day 2009 to uncover the nation’s guilty reading secrets. Of the 65% who claimed to have read a book which in truth they haven’t 42% admit to having said they had read modern classic 1984.

Those who lied have claimed to have read:

1. 1984 by George Orwell (42%)
2. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (31%)
3. Ulysses by James Joyce (25%)
4. The Bible (24%)
5. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (16%)
6. A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking (15%)
7. Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (14%)
8. In Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust (9%)
9. Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama (6%)
10. The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins (6%)

1984 was a school assignment. We’ve always been reading it, just as we’ve always been at war with Eastasia. I also read #6, which was probably the last pop-sci physics book I ever read in its entirety — even before starting grad school, I didn’t need to read the spoon-fed version of quantum mechanics or relativity, so there isn’t much point. (I’ve read bits of other books in order to clear up misconceptions of what the author was talking about). I’ve read parts of #4. Haven’t read any of the others, nor have I claimed to.