It doesn’t matter how long they might be, and it doesn’t matter that someone hasn’t read some books because, the truth is, they’ll claim they’ve read them anyway, for social clout.
A shelf can look very serious
People own War and Peace with a real sense of confidence, and they’ll leave a bookmark somewhere inside, but it doesn’t mean they’ve read it. They’ll probably know the names, Pierre, Natasha, Andrei, Napoleon, yet nothing more, not even the plot details.
It makes sense because the book does keep changing all the time. One second it’s family drama, then battlefield scenes, random French conversations, and that’s all before the two-part epilogue. Yes, two parts, you need a lifetime to finish this book.
Some pages get skipped at home
The Bible. Everyone’s heard of it, and sure, lots of people have honestly read some of it, a verse here, a psalm there. But they haven’t actually read the whole thing, at least not cover to cover, yet that doesn’t stop them from pretending that they have.
It’s a lot to read, in all honesty, and it’s not exactly light reading either, so it figures that it’s hard to read. But laws? Letters? Poems? It’s a lot, and it doesn’t matter how many quotes people tell you from the Bible, it doesn’t mean they’ve read it.
The assignment did a lot
To Kill a Mockingbird has a pretty common excuse, and that’s school. Plenty of people sat in the room while it was assigned, sure, they might’ve even watched the film, great, yet that doesn’t mean they finished reading it. They might not have even properly started.
They’ll know the themes, of course they will, they’re pretty obvious. It feels like a safe choice of book to say you’ve read because, when someone asks you about it, you can pretend it was so long ago that you don’t remember the details, simple as that.
One day takes a while
One of the most difficult things about Ulysses is just saying the name, it’s not exactly common, after all. But then you try to start reading it, and it becomes even more challenging, since Joyce starts playing every trick he can think of.
The simplest of errands in the book becomes more of a crossword, with no easy answer in sight. That’s before you even get to stuff like Leopold Bloom, Stephen Dedalus, and the Homer connection.
The words got famous first
It’s easy to fake reading 1984 because the book’s details have already become part of normal speech, like ‘Big Brother’ and ‘Room 101.’ Doublethink, Newspeak, and the thought police? All part of the book, and all things people confidently talk about like they’ve read the book.
They could’ve, or they could’ve only read three quotes online and left it at that, who knows, really? As long as you know the references, it seems good enough.
The whale gets there slowly
You can describe Moby-Dick in one word, and that’s epic. Epic in length, epic in writing, and epically difficult to read, really, even though the opening line ‘Call me Ishmael’ seems relatively simple enough. The book’s not, though.
It becomes a lot harder to read once you add in Captain Ahab, the white whale, and the rest of the boat crew. Not the simple whale story that it first appears, and that’s why a lot of people pretend they’ve read it, without actually doing so.
Monsters make good shortcuts
The best-known scenes in The Odyssey are the ones that everyone talks about when they say they’ve read the poem. You know the ones, the Cyclops, the Sirens, Circe, Penelope, the long trip home, all of them, they’re everywhere.
People collect those stories and use them to pretend that they’ve read the poem. They’ll talk about how great all the adventures are, even though there’s so much more to the poem than the famous battle scenes.
The first fall carries it
The famous parts of Paradise Lost are right there on the surface. Satan falls, Adam and Eve mess up, there’s a garden with a snake, the story’s pretty famous. So, when someone hears a few lines in class, they’re able to act like they’ve read the whole thing.
They can pretend they made their way through Milton for a weekend, even though they really didn’t. Just think about it. The 1667 edition had 10 books, then the 1674 version had 12, hardly light reading, is it?
Darcy does too much work
The idea of Pride and Prejudice is everywhere, and some of the character names are really well-known, too, like Mr Darcy. There have also been a dozen adaptations of it, including the famous 1995 BBC version with that Darcy shirt scene, so it’s easy to fake reading it.
But watching those adaptations doesn’t replace the feeling of having actually read the book, and it doesn’t mean you can start bragging about reading it. The truth is, reading Austen is a different thing from recognizing Darcy, way different.
The title enters arguments
People love claiming they’ve read Marx, and they’re usually talking about Das Kapital when they say that, although ‘read’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. They’ve probably only read one paragraph of The Communist Manifesto in college, maybe a quote or two, nothing more.
That’s mostly because it’s not exactly light waiting-room reading, it’s pretty long and deals with some pretty difficult concepts, too. But talking about the title alone is usually enough to win some credit.
Sources: Please see here for a complete listing of all sources that were consulted in the preparation of this article.
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