Those Lieing Brits...

LONDON (Reuters) - Two out of three Britons have lied about reading books they have not, and George Orwell's "1984" tops the literary fib list, according to a survey published Thursday.

Commissioned by organizers of World Book Day, an annual celebration of reading in Britain, the study also shows that the author people really enjoy reading is J.K. Rowling, creator of the bestselling Harry Potter wizard series. [Did they interview a bunch of kids?]

According to the survey, 65 percent of people have pretended to have read books, and of those, 42 percent singled out "1984." Next on the list came "War and Peace" by Leo Tolstoy and in third place was James Joyce's "Ulysses." [*Inserts jokes about made up statistics here*]

The Bible was in fourth position, and newly elected President Barack Obama's autobiography "Dreams from My Father" came ninth.

Aside from a list of ten titles which respondents were asked to tick or leave blank, many admitted wrongly claiming they had read other "classics" including Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Herman Melville. [This sounds like a terrible survey...They just make a sheet with a list of ten books, they ask people to check the ones they've read, then they assume all the checks are lies. They also leave a line for "other books you've read," where people can claime to have read any number of books.]

Asked why they had lied about reading a book, the main reason was to impress the person they were speaking to. [Great detective work there.... I coulda told you that without asking them.]

The study, carried out on the World Book Day website in January and February, surveyed 1,342 members of the public. [Requirments: Must not have read any of the books. That way when someone checks that they've read the book, they can mark it as a lie. Didn't know surveying could be this simple...]

Those who lied have claimed to have read:

1. 1984 - George Orwell (42 percent) [Read]

2. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy (31) [Read]

3. Ulysses - James Joyce (25) [Read]

4. The Bible (24) [Read]

5. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert (16) [Never even heard of it.]

6. A Brief History of Time - Stephen Hawking (15) [I'll let the statistics speak for this one.]

7. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie (14) [This was about Midnight's Children... of course.]

8. In Remembrance of Things Past - Marcel Proust (9) [Sounds alright, can't say I've read it.]

9. Dreams from My Father - Barack Obama (6) [Never heard of this guy...]

10. The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkins (6) [Nope.]

[11. Cookies: A History - Myself (0)] [Darn... Nobody wants to read my book...]

(Reporting by Mike Collett-White) [I'm betting: Nome De Plum]