The Book Bench: Lying About Reading

newyorker.com:

Big books have never really been my thing. The sweeping epics, the Great Russian Novels by the Great Russian Writers, the thousand-page masterpieces: it's a whole subgenre that I've never bothered to crack (I was worryingly going to admit that the longest book I've read might have Harry Potter in the title, but a search reveals that "Our Mutual Friend" clocks in at eight hundred and eighty pages--with a sensibly small font!--so I guess I am an adult after all).

Read the whole story: newyorker.com

Comments

[inkongirl]

11:28 AM on 05/27/2011

Okay, I didn't actually read "To Kill a Mockingbird" until earlier this year. But I still got a decent grade on the book report I wrote on it back in high school.

[luziannagirl]

08:34 AM on 05/26/2011

I guarantee that at least half the Conservatives claiming to have read an Ayn Rand novel ---or anything written by Rand----are lying.

And then there's the contingent of my fellow Luziannians embarrassed to admit how widely read they really are....

[frank day]

10:37 AM on 05/26/2011

Embarrasse­d to admit how widely read they really are....
-----------------------------------------------------------

Interesting point, in some cirlces literacy is seen as a negative trait.

[luziannagirl]

08:21 AM on 05/27/2011

Yeah. Down here, especially if you want to get elected, you can't appear too smart and erudite.

[ptrgamb]

08:11 AM on 05/26/2011

Sorry to see "The New Yorker" stooping to writing something like this.
I've actually read Crime and Punishment and the Brothers K and War and Peace. Glad I did. I wasn't suffering.

[naschkatze]

10:47 AM on 05/26/2011

It's a sign of how lost we are.

[AbeMartin]

08:08 AM on 05/26/2011

Most, so-called "Christians" would have to list the Bible.

[VungTauVet]

07:35 AM on 05/26/2011

Playboy

[yoozum]

06:58 AM on 05/26/2011

I remember back in high school I read a summary of Crime and Punishment, but I still did better on the exam than most of the class simply because I'm Russian and was able to keep track of all the Russian names better than my classmates.

[naschkatze]

12:02 PM on 05/26/2011

It's all those patronymics which throw Americans.

[Counter Sniper]

06:48 AM on 05/26/2011

SarahBarricuda lied about reading any/all of them

[European1919]

05:58 AM on 05/26/2011

I'm illiterate.

[WYHKTai-Tai]

06:02 AM on 05/26/2011

Ha! Liar!

[European1919]

06:09 AM on 05/26/2011

Qui? Moi? Jamais!

(See - I'm illiterate in more than one languages *guffaw*)

[WYHKTai-Tai]

05:56 AM on 05/26/2011

I'm lying about reading both of these articles. I totally skimmed both this one and the 'Literary Stockholm Syndrome' one.

[cheo]

04:47 AM on 05/26/2011

I don't believe I have lied about reading a book. I have lied about liking or understanding some for fear of being thought not clever enough. I was very young when I read Crime and Punishment, Gravity's Rainbow, Brothers Karamazov, and other such tomes, but I don't think I was ready; I didn't really like them all that much, and hate to admit it. But now I can't seem to get excited about re-reading them; there are so many great new authors. Shakepeare's good any time though.

While I don't care to read Brothers Karamazov again, I would like to re-read The Grand Inquisitor section. I did like Fowles, and would re-read those.

A worse problem is that I buy books and don't get to them all. And I like so many genres.

[naschkatze]

10:43 AM on 05/26/2011

Well, we're all different! I love The Brothers Karamazov, my favorite Dostoevsky, but The Grand Inquisitor section is the one I could do without.

[CharlesBrown008]

04:27 AM on 05/26/2011

I lied about reading just about every book I was supposed to read in university.

[Adam L Brinklow]

02:28 AM on 05/26/2011

Well, I lied about reading the Necronomicon.

[ramal]

02:28 AM on 05/26/2011

I have never lied about it but the list of books that I have picked up and just couldn't finish would comprise a book---a large one.

[naschkatze]

10:44 AM on 05/26/2011

I'm with you on that one. Moby Dick being at the top of my list.

[ThermoChemist]

12:03 AM on 05/26/2011

"My White House aides lied about those 60 books they say I read back in 2006..!"
-- Dubya

+++

-- A Humbled Presidency
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/060820/28presidency.htm

[Macus]

04:16 AM on 05/26/2011

Did they really say that? If they did, you're right its impossible, for W no less.

[luziannagirl]

08:42 AM on 05/26/2011

That bit of propaganda was aimed at the vast majority of Americans who don't read, and therefore don't have the ability to realize that nobody so inept at spoken language is likely to be a reader.

It's like somebody posing as an expert. They fool everyone except the experts, but if the experts are so few in number or sufficiently invisible and powerless, they get away with it .

So, only the literate knew differently, but alas...we are too few in number!

[ThermoChemist]

10:17 PM on 05/26/2011

: )

Yeah, I agree with what you said..!

Also, too... it was 2006..!

Dubya's prestige took a bit of a hit after Katrina. He was looking for "something" to do about his tarnished image. His every-man persona (the one who admitted he doesn't read) must have needed a change. So, "The Decider" decided that he needed to do a 180 and proclaim "Look at me. I'm an avid reader! I'm not dumb. I'm smart!"

-- never mind that when questioned about what he read, he couldn't answer.
-- never mind that people who DO read more, tend to have better communication
skills (which makes Dubya's claim even more questionable)

[jeanrenoir]

12:02 AM on 05/26/2011

There's a great, very telling line in the film Coal Miner's Daughter. Loretta Lynn tells her husband, "I may be ignorant, but I'm not stupid." There used to be an America in which people were, rightly, ashamed of being ignorant. I realized when I heard that line in the movie, that that America was already dead decades ago, killed by Sixties contempt for "elitists," since, after all, the Beatles were obviously more important than Jesus and Tolstoy PUT TOGETHER!

[cheo]

04:22 AM on 05/26/2011

As a participant in that time in America's history, I am proud to have been part of expanding our concepts of what constitute perception, literature and art.

[naschkatze]

10:45 AM on 05/26/2011

And today rappers being considered poets.