From The Guardian, a national British newspaper:
A recent survey of 2,000 people suggests that the majority of people pretend to have read classic books in order to appear more intelligent, with more than half of those polled displaying unread books on their shelves and 3 percent slipping a highbrow cover on books they’d rather not be seen reading in public.
The books most likely to be lied about are, naturally, the books most often filmed, talked about and studied in school … Are any of them in your pretend-I’ve-read/never-finished pile, or do you save your literary fibbing for “Finnegans Wake” and “Infinite Jest”? Share your guilty secrets below.
The top 10 books people claim to read but haven’t
1. 1984 by George Orwell (26%)

2. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (19%)
3. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (18%)
4. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger (15%)
5. A Passage to India by E.M. Forster (12%)
6. Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien (11%)
7. To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee (10%)
8. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky (8%)
9. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (8%)
10. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte (5%)