19 Books That Everyone Lies About Having Read

If you have a full library of books that you’ve read under your belt, that makes you super studious, right? That’s probably why people lie about what books they’ve read.

We’ve all done it. You know the drill: You’re in the middle of a conversation with someone who starts telling you about an impressive piece of classic literature. You totally have that book on your bookshelf, so that counts as having read it before, right? Right!

Don’t worry, you’re not the only one who has lied about a book you’ve read (or didn’t read for that matter). In fact, you’ve probably lied about the same books as your friend. It’s always the ones that were on your high school reading list that you slid on by with SparkNotes (ah, remember SparkNotes?).

Anyway, here are 19 books that everyone has probably lied about having read before:

  1. Lord of the Flies

    By William Golding

  2. The Great Gatsby

    By F. Scott Fitzgerald

  3. To Kill a Mockingbird

    By Harper Lee

  4. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

    By Mark Twain

  5. The Scarlet Letter

    By Nathaniel Hawthorne

  6. The Catcher in the Rye

    By J. D. Salinger

  7. The Diary of Anne Frank

    By Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich

  8. Little Women

    By Louisa May Alcott

  9. Pride and Prejudice

    By Jane Austen

  10. A Tale of Two Cities

    By Charles Dickens

  11. Gulliver’s Travels

    By Jonathan Swift

  12. Moby Dick

    By Herman Melville

  13. Gone With the Wind

    By Margaret Mitchell

  14. The Red Badge of Courage

    By Stephen Crane

  15. Catch-22

    By Joseph Heller

  16. Romeo and Juliet

    By Shakespeare

  17. Of Mice and Men

    By John Steinbeck

  18. 1984

    By George Orwell

  19. Wuthering Heights

    By Emily Brontë

What books have you lied about reading?