…and don’t intend to read either!
A few of these lists were floating around the other day, lists of books people pretend they have read.
I found this one on Buzzfeed and thought it would be interesting to see if I have actually read any of them, and if not, would I pretend to have read them? (Spoiler: If I haven’t read it I’m not going to lie about it).
- Great Expectations by Charles Dickens – Yes
- The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien – No (I didn’t even watch the movie)
- The Bible – Parts
- Moby Dick by Herman Melville – Yes
- The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand – No
- The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway – No
- Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov – No
- Catch-22 by Joseph Heller – No
- 1984 by George Orwell – Yes
- To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee – No (Don’t look so aghast!)
- War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy – Definitely not
- Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson – No
- Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert – No
- The Odyssey by Homer – Yes
- Ulysses by James Joyce – No
- Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen – Yes (One of my favourites)
- Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte – No
- Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck – No
- The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath – No
- The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger – No
- The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne – No
- Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky – No
So, I’ve read 4 out of 22 (not including the partial bits of the Bible).
Does the fact I have not ready these books make me uneducated? No. Does it make me less? No. Do I feel the need to lie about reading them? No.
Some of them I would rather stick needles in my eyes than read. Some of them I might possibly think of reading at some stage, maybe, probably, if I was really bored. None of them make me want to download them to my Kindle right now.
The fact is, I read a lot. It may not be intellectual classics but its reading. I read romance, fantasy, sci-fi, suspense, sagas. I read and that’s what counts.
Anyone want to chime in about the books on the list they have/haven’t/lied about reading?