Do Americans even care enough to lie?

I wonder whether even educated Americans care enough to pretend familiarity with books they have not read. The English apparently do. From The Guardian, "Our guilty secrets: the books we only say we've read":

"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen." Ring any bells? How about: "The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats." Many will not have read the novel from which these are among the opening lines - but nearly half of us are happy to lie and say we have, a survey reveals today.

George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four comes top in a poll of the UK's guilty reading secrets. Asked if they had ever claimed to read a book when they had not, 65% of respondents said yes and 42% said they had falsely claimed to have read Orwell's classic in order to impress. This is followed by Tolstoy's War and Peace (31%), James Joyce's Ulysses (25%) and the Bible (24%).

The poll, conducted to tie in with World Book Day today, also reveals that many of us are impatient readers - we skip to the end - and are not particularly bothered about how we treat the actual book - we turn the page to keep our place.

While 33% say they have never lied, a clear majority have. ....

I suspect that more Americans than Britons would be ashamed to admit that they haven't read the Bible.

I haven't even read some of the classics I have on my shelves but I know the plots — I've seen the movies and I read the Classics Illustrated! Of course I progressed from the comic versions to the actual books in some cases, but but in others my cultural literacy is entirely due to those illustrated versions.

Our guilty secrets: the books we only say we've read | Books | The Guardian