The ten books you've lied about reading

As part of their annual Guilty Secrets survey, U.K. reading advocacy group Spread the Word has published a list of the ten books that people (or, at least, the British) have dishonestly claimed to have read.

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.

The list, after the jump.

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%)