BOOK DISHONESTY
What books have you lied about reading? We asked our team to share their fake reads so we can send them to books court for perjury!
Reading between the lies
I tried to read Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert, because I am not a book snob — also because every time I admitted to not having read it, people would insist that I absolutely MUST read it. So I tried. But there must have been some sort of bug going round, because every time I opened the book I was afflicted by fits of convulsive nausea. These attacks mysteriously stopped when I closed the book — or my eyes. So I stopped. I lied about having read it to stop those people who kept telling me, when I admitted to not having read it, that I absolutely MUST read it. Sue de Groot, Insight deputy editor
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. I wanted another tick on some 100 books you must read list. I fake read it in varsity as it really didn't interest me at all and it still doesn't. Jennifer Platt, Books editor
Somewhere between my first English tutorial at Wits and becoming a journalist, I got it into my head that we had studied James Joyce’s Ulysses in class. Of course we hadn’t — there isn’t an academic in the known world who would try to teach Ulysses to feral undergraduates, not least because it’s likely few professors have made it to the end. Ulysses is unreadable. Those who have read it are regarded with awe, as if they have won a medal for bravery under fire. Still, when people ask me if I’ve read Ulysses, I say yes. I just don’t say that the Ulysses I read was an Alistair MacLean airport thriller about warships. It was excellent too. Paul Ash, Travel editor Every James Baldwin book and Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. I lie to keep up with the Woke Folk. Because are you really woke if you’ve never read Baldwin or Fanon? I haven’t seen
Baldwin’s documentary I Am
Not Your Negro either (and I lie about that too). Woke card revoked. I have rated books on Goodreads that I haven’t finished. Shameless. Pearl Boshomane Tsotetsi, Lifestyle editor The Bible by God, angels, Moses, St Paul? I’d heard all the stories in nursery school and by the time I was old enough to read it for myself I was also old enough to read Richard Dawkins, who wrote: “The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.” I’ll read the Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House by Michael Wolff instead. Andrea Nagel, Lifestyle features editor Les Miserables by Victor Hugo. To say that I’ve outright “lied” about reading this delicious avalanche of prose is misleading. I have read it, just not all of it, or even half of it for that matter. The problem is my attention span is not built to process nearly 1 500 pages of well written but overwrought prose. That doesn’t stop me from claiming to have pored over every honeyed word. It is a shame to admit but smugly announcing that you read Hugo makes my inner hipster purr with self satisfaction. Yolisa Mkele, features writer