A third of the UK population has no idea who wrote Great Expectations, fretted the Daily Mail, as the results of "a worrying survey" of adult reading habits in the UK were revealed yesterday.

Who's worried? Certainly not me, and particularly when the survey went on to reveal that a different 30% not only knew who had written Great Expectations, but had read the novel.

Surely that's not a worrying result, but an accolade for the comprehensive education system. A straw poll of the Guardian office revealed that nearly all of us had read it at school.

Some of the findings of the nationwide survey of 2,000 people, conducted by Opinium Research, are more surprising still. Twelve per cent of us have, apparently, read Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing. Really?

If I were to survey my friends and relations, I very much doubt that one in ten could swear to having read Much Ado About Nothing, even if most of them will have seen it performed at least once.

So what is going on here? One thing, I suspect, is a bit of 'misremembering'. More than a thousand fibbers swarmed out of the woodwork earlier this month when we blogged about another survey revealing how many of us have lied about our reading. And, surprise, surprise, the third most lied about book was Great Expectations by - who's the author again? - Charles Dickens.

If you take into account the 8% who admit to having lied about reading Pride and Prejudice (the seventh most read title in the Opinium survey) and the 15% who have lied about Catcher in the Rye (ninth most read), the picture becomes a bit more worrying.

What is clear is that all the good work that is done at school is undone as soon as people emerge into the adult world.

Nearly a quarter of all adults (24%) have read fewer than five books in the last year, while one in seven (15%) admitted that they had not read a single one in that time. (That's 10% of women and 21% of men.)

But nine per cent of us claim to have read more than 50 books in the last year, which is surely cause for celebration – no matter whether those books are thrillers (favoured by 30%), crime novels (26%) or romance (16%).

The truly depressing discovery is possibly the most predictable: the most widely read work of contemporary "literature" is The Da Vinci Code. Unfortunately, it's unlikely anybody would lie about that.

Proportion who've read the classics



Animal Farm - 36%

Romeo and Juliet - 33%

Great Expectations - 30%

Macbeth - 29%

To Kill a Mockingbird - 28%

Lord of the Flies - 28%

Pride and Prejudice - 26%

Of Mice and Men - 25%

Catcher in the Rye - 18%

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde - 15%

Much Ado about Nothing - 12%

None of the above - 28%