A new survey reveals the top 10 books people claim to have read but haven't. Be it War and Peace or Infinite Jest, share your uncracked spines here

A recent survey of 2,000 people suggests that the majority of people pretend to have read classic books in order to appear more intelligent, with more than half of those polled displaying unread books on their shelves and 3% slipping a highbrow cover on books they'd rather not be seen reading in public.

The books most likely to be lied about are, naturally, the books most often filmed, talked about and studied in school (some of the respondents must have been lying since GCSE onwards). Are any of them in your pretend-I've-read/never-finished pile, or do you save your literary fibbing for Finnegans Wake and Infinite Jest? Share your guilty secrets below.

The top 10 books people claim to read but haven't

1 1984 by George Orwell (26%)

2 War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (19%)

3 Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (18%)

4 The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger (15%)

5 A Passage to India by EM Forster (12%)

6 Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien (11%)

7 To Kill A Mocking Bird by Harper Lee (10%)

8 Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky (8%)

9 Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (8%)

10 Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte (5%)