The Top 10 Books People Lie About Having Read
Saturday, January 27th, 2007Over on The Book Blog at ReadersRead.com, they give a list of the top 10 books that people in Britain are most inclined to say they have read, but never had. Apparently, these folks think they’re liable to lose face if they can’t enter the conversation about the books.
Well, here’s our chance to root them out, or, here’s our chance to help them out.
- When one of these comes up in conversation, ask about that person’s favorite details from the book, or what they thought of the ending.
- Ask about characters that didn’t really exist in the story, or tell about your favorite part involving your made-up character.
- Say that really, you only read the Cliff’s Notes and that you think that the
rightingwriting (Oops!) was better in Cliff’s notes than in the original text. - Say that only feeble minded people still read books. You listened to the podcast while you sailed the Mediterranean last summer.
Or to encourage them to actually read, if you suspect that they don’t, you might steer the conversation toward
- how great books are so much more satisfying than TV
- how reading books restores your mind rather than deadening it like those marketing driven, manipulative, dreck-filled patched-together images created simply to drive you into the store so you too can feed at the trough of the gods of commerce.
- how reading stimulates your ability to solve problems at work
- how reading helps you understand other person’s points of view
- how hard it is to put down a good book, especially compared to how hard it is to find a good TV show while you’re flipping through the channels
