So the Guardian paper posted an article a year ago about classics that people generally claim to read. I'll post the link at the bottom of the post though.
The top ten books people claim to have read, but haven't, are:
1984 by George Orwell – 26% I tried and failed (Too boring)
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy – 19% I got three-quarters through when I had to stop because of GCSE's
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens – 18% Read and loved!
Catcher in the Rye by J D Salinger – 15% Not approached
A Passage to India by E M Forster – 12% Not approached
Lord of the Rings by J R R Tolkein – 11% Love, love, love, love!
To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee – 10% Tried but gave up, I wasn't feeling it.
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky – 8% Not approached
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen – 8% Do I even have to answer this?
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë – 5% The only Bronte book I can read without getting annoyed.
Titles that just missed the cut are The Bible (3%), Homer’s Odyssey (3%) andWuthering Heights (2%).
See it's okay not to have read any of these because they're not commonly read or taught. Okay Pride and Prejudice, To Kill a Mockingbird and Great Expectations are but not to the degree that everyone has to read them. My high school English offered Lord of the Flies and Heroes as the two books for our exams, of course the books were chosen for the sets you were in but I requested to read Heroes in addition to LOTF because I wanted to expand my choices...I chose LOTF though because Simon and Piggy </3
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/10286930/More-than-half-of-us-lie-about-reading-classic-novels.html
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