20 Books People Lie About Reading

There's a remarkable correlation between Tolstoy and FOMO - yes, you really did read that sentence.

It seems the BBC's new adaptation of 'War and Peace' has reminded an awful lot of us that we never did manage to battle through the Russian epic novel, but come on guys, let's not be so hard on ourselves; when you can watch a six-part TV version starring megababe Lily James, who really has time to bother with the 2,000-page classic?

Anyway, we're understanding the plot, we know the characters' names, we get that it's set in 1805 because of the costumes... so that means we've basically read the book, right?

Well it seems a lot of people think so, as a new survey has suggested that many of us have pretended to have read the book in order to fit in.

The online survey further states that a quarter of people are prepared to lie about certain books they think they should have read to appear smarter and more attractive.

The survey, which had 2,000 respondents, has used the information to rank the books most people lie about in order, with our guy Tolstoy appearing twice (it's not you Leo, it's us!) and Charles Dickens appearing a whopping three times. But the list also has a few modern suprises, including 'Fifty Shades of Grey' and the 'Harry Potter' series.

40 per cent of people claimed their biggest reason for lying was to prevent themselves from being left out of conversations, and just under one-third said it was to appear more intelligent.

Yikes, guess we'll all be spending our lunch hour in the library then...

Check out the full list to swot up on below: