Telling tales: Our habit of wishful reading

“YES, I said yes, I will yes,” — er, actually, I won’t bother. I’ll just pretend to have read it instead.

Pretending to have read the classics seems to be a very popular way of boosting your intelligence in the eyes of your peers, according to a survey which lists James Joyce’s Ulysses as among the top 10 books people have pretended to read.

Surprisingly, heading the list is George Orwell’s 1984, with the Bible in fourth position.