Books Everyone Claims to Have Read

Twenty-five million copies in forty languages, and exactly one equation: warned that every formula would halve his readership, Hawking kept only E=mc². Jordan Ellenberg's 2014 Hawking Index, built from where Kindle highlights stop, scored it 6.6 per cent, and the index carries this book's name even though the book placed fourth on Ellenberg's own sample. Lucid, short, and set down somewhere around the light cones.

Seven volumes, 4,215 pages in the standard edition, and the Guinness World Record for the longest novel ever published, which is both the problem and the appeal. Most people stop after Swann's Way, having met the madeleine and concluded the point was made. It was not made. Proust published the first volume in 1913 and the last in 1927, five years after his own death.

Shakespeare and Company published it on 2 February 1922, Joyce's fortieth birthday, in a run of 1,000 numbered copies; that same press's 1924 printing runs to 758 pages. Eighteen episodes, and the last of them — Molly Bloom in bed — arrives in eight paragraphs with almost no punctuation, which is where bookmarks stop moving. Consensus would put it first. Third is fairer, because its claimers usually did try.

Little, Brown published 1,079 pages in 1996, with 388 endnotes at the back, some of them carrying footnotes of their own, so a reader needs two bookmarks and a strong wrist. The Entertainment — a film cartridge so absorbing that viewers stop doing anything else and die — is a joke aimed squarely at the object in your hands. Fourth rather than first, because the quitters here admit where they quit.

Fourth on the BBC Store's poll of 2,000 Britons naming books they had lied about reading, reported in 2016, behind Alice in Wonderland of all things. Everyone blames the French; only about two per cent of the text is French, and Tolstoy stripped even that from an 1873 revision before restoring it. What actually stops people is the second epilogue, an essay on historical causation with no story in it.

Éditions du Seuil brought it out in French in August 2013; Harvard published Arthur Goldhammer's translation in 2014, and 1.5 million copies had sold by January 2015. Ellenberg scored it lowest of anything he measured — 2.4 per cent by one report, 2.6 by another — because Kindle highlights stopped near page 26 of roughly 700. Take that gently: the inequality r > g lands early, and marking up is not finishing.

Third on that same BBC Store poll, and the mechanism is not mysterious: three films did the claiming. HarperCollins's one-volume 2021 edition runs 1,248 pages, appendices included, and they are not optional if you want the ending to land. Where readers actually stall is the Council of Elrond, a long chapter of seated exposition arriving early in the second book.

Writers from 55 countries, polled by the Norwegian Nobel Institute in 2002, voted it the greatest work of fiction ever written, and something over 500 million copies have been printed since Part One appeared in 1605. Part Two, from 1615, is the better half and the one nobody reaches: it is where Quixote starts meeting people who have read the first volume. Open Library's 2014 Lerner edition runs 1,292 pages.

Eight hundred and twenty-four pages in Farrar, Straus and Giroux's 2002 Pevear and Volokhonsky translation, serialised in The Russian Messenger from January 1879 to November 1880, with its author dead less than four months after publication. The Grand Inquisitor sits in Book V: Ivan's poem about Christ returning to Seville and being arrested for it. Almost everyone has read that. Almost nobody has read the trial.

655,478 words in the original French, and by one count 955 of its 2,783 pages are essay rather than story: nineteen chapters on the Battle of Waterloo whose connection to the plot arrives in the last paragraph of them, then a guided descent into the Paris sewers. Published across five volumes in 1862. Skipping the digressions is allowed. Claiming you read them is the subject of this list.

Random House printed 100,000 copies on 10 October 1957 at 1,168 pages, and sales had passed ten million by 2022. Rand spent more than two years on John Galt's radio address, finishing the speech on 13 October 1955, and in the finished novel it is the wall most readers hit. It is simultaneously the most quoted passage in the book and the most reliable place to close the cover.

John Murray's first printing of 1,250 copies was taken up by booksellers on 22 November 1859, two days ahead of publication, and Darwin revised through six editions in his lifetime; Open Library's record of Murray's 1869 printing runs 596 pages. Anyone can state the argument. Rather fewer have got as far as the full title's second half — the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life — which does work the shorthand quietly loses.

Editorial Sudamericana published it in Buenos Aires in May 1967; Gregory Rabassa's English followed in 1970, and it has since sold more than 50 million copies across 46 languages. Why people stall is measurable: the Buendía family tree carries the name Aureliano twenty-two times and José Arcadio four. Anyone who finished it has flipped backwards at least once, and probably lied about that too.

Kobo's 2014 data found fewer than half its Canadian and British readers reached the end of a novel that had just taken the Pulitzer. Ellenberg's index rates it his most-read title at 98.5 per cent — but that measures how widely people highlight, where Kobo counted pages actually turned. Little, Brown's 2013 first edition runs 771 pages, and Carel Fabritius's small chained bird, stolen early, is the image everyone can describe.

Seventeen years of writing, 628 pages in Faber and Faber's first edition of 4 May 1939, and composite words drawing on some sixty to seventy languages. Ends mid-sentence — a way a lone a last a loved a long the — completing by running back into riverrun on page one. Last place is not an insult: it is the only book here almost nobody bothers to lie about, which is what makes it the control.