high-falutin'

on putting on airs

Engraving on wood by W. M. Thackeray himself, for the first edition of The Book of Snobs.

I’ve never lied and pretended to read a book I haven’t read. But when I was younger, I sometimes used to lie… the other way. That is, I would pretend not to have read things I had read. Not very often. But it would feel sort of rude, like I was showing off, if I talked about what I was actually reading—Umberto Eco or Italo Calvino or whatever. (That’s what I remember reading around this time, mostly.) So if it came up, even if it came up because somebody else had read it, I would just sort of pretend not to have read it. Like oh, yeah, I heard of that.

Again, I suspect I only did this maybe four or five times at most. But it’s what I always think of when people talk about lying about reading books. I’ll freely confess to not having read this or that book if asked. I only read Ulysses this year! But if somebody asked me what I was reading, at certain times in my life, I would have just said “oh, I’…