literary jail beckons again

[adelaidesean]

Remember that long conversation we had about litratcher a couple of weeks back?

Well...

"Asked if they had ever claimed to read a book when they had not, 65% of respondents said yes and 42% said they had falsely claimed to have read Orwell's classic [1984] in order to impress. This is followed by Tolstoy's War and Peace (31%), James Joyce's Ulysses (25%) and the Bible (24%)."

I swear I really truly have read Ulysses!

PS. Thanks to catsparx for the link.

PPS. Gary Numan rocks!

Comments

[nyssa-p.livejournal.com]

HAH!

Sorry to not be impressive, but I haven't read any cept for some chapters from the Bible. I did read half of Thomas More's Utopia a little less than a decade ago though. That count? :P

[mireille21.livejournal.com]

My problem in answering that question is in being able to remember if I did actually read that book. or did I just read another one by the same author? Or see the film? Or a very poor imitation? etc. Too many books, they all begin to blur.

ah, but have you read all three of those

[ozdragonlady.livejournal.com]

War and Peace ...sometime in my 20s
Ulysses ... more than once, at uni 20 years ago
Bible .. all the way through - at school in UK, we had a brilliant evangelical/anglican lay preacher for a teacher who gave us a very solid education - versus indoctrination :)

[haloumi.livejournal.com]

Given that 1984 is a mere pamphlet, in size but not stature, compared to the others, I'm amazed that people claim to have read it when reading it would be relatively straightforward. I must confess that I have never read War and Peace because I'm still waiting for Snoopy to finish it, reading it at a word a day*.

I realise that Riddley Walker is a little too obscure to make the top of a list like that but I would have thought that a very likely book to claim to have read, rather than having actually read.

(I must also confess that, while I have read Ulysses, I remember surprisingly little of it. It is my intention to go back and read it again. After War and Peace.)

* Which will happen about 1533 years^ from the time that he started. It's no wonder Woodstock became irked.

^ And for those of you who haven't read Riddley Walker+, this gives you the time to have an entire decaying post-apocalyptic civilisation or two and go over to Snoopy's place and he would still be reading.

+ Which I recommend. #

# Reading the book, that is. I suppose that I could have just written 'A book which I recommend' but what is the point of a footnote if not to provide some immutability in a mutable world? **

** Apart from, of course, the actual point of footnotes.

Re=posted due to bad formatting

[murasaki-1966.livejournal.com]

I have read 1984, but only because it was the novel I had to study for the my HSC (in, you guessed it, 1984). I read a lot of classics because I did English and Australian Literature as a side stream to my librarianship degreee. That's when I fell in love with Austen and Trollope. Haven't read War and Peace yet. I'm waiting for retirement for that one.

I wonder how many people have read some of the great books of Australian Literature, eg For the Term of his natural life, Robbery under arms, Such is Life(a personal favourite, Wildcat falling or Wake in Fright?

[murasaki-1966.livejournal.com]

Please tell us about the Gary Numan concert.