Top ten books we lie about reading
1. The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R Tolkien
2. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
3. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
4. Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus – John Gray
5. 1984 – George Orwell
6. Harry Potter and the Philosophers Stone – J.K Rowling
7. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
8. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
9. The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
10. Diary of Anne Frank – Anne Frank
Tuesday, January 30, 2007
Have you read? ... Oh yes!
Apparently,according to the Museums, Libraries and Archive Council, 40% of Brits lie about what they've read. I can buy that. After all, I've learnt the hard way not to do it myself, and I've had painful conversations with people who have pretended to read my book, but some of the names on the list of the top ten books we apparently pretend to have read really surprise me. Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus..? The cynic in me says that must be men pretending to have read it to seem more caring and open, and if that gambit works, then women really must be from Venus. Just wait until his elastic band starts to beckon, girls...
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
This work by Sarah Salway is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
3 comments:
"Diary of Anne Frank" ...HA! There's a tale. I read this when I was 13,alone in my parent's car in a wood by a stream near a village near Kendal. My parents were visiting my grandfather who had a secret 2nd family.( It really WAS the stuff of fiction...)
That book obsessed me; I think it was Anne's love affair with Peter. It intrigued me at 13 even more than the horror of her captivity.
Last summer I wrote a story based on this incident, although in this I was by a lake in pouring rain ( but nevertheless, reading "Anne"..) I sent it to a magazine asking for writing on " rain"but it wasn't published..
Ooo Jan that sounds good - would love to read it. There's such a strong pull to some subjects that won't leave us alone, isn't there? Where are you going to send it next?
Havent re-sent ( not good at such stuff) but shall think about it.
I liked the concept of 2 13 yr olds.... one with the claustrophobia of car/family/weather AND the other, Anne with her terrors in HER captivity...
Post a Comment