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-- as reported by the BBC:
Nearly half of all men and one-third of women have lied about what they have read to try to impress friends or potential partners, a survey suggests. Men were most likely to do this to appear intellectual or romantic, found the poll of 1,500 people by Populus for the National Year of Reading campaign. The men polled said they would be most impressed by women who read news websites, Shakespeare or song lyrics. Women said men should have read Nelson Mandela's biography or Shakespeare.
So it turns out we were lying about the wrong books all along. Susan Sontag; Wittgenstein; Nietzsche; John Cleland; Kant -- babe magnets, one and all (or so we'd believed, with little in the way of first hand confirmation). "Lord, what fools these mortals be!" as Puck puts it so succinctly in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act III, scene 2, line 115; one of my favorites of his plays, by the way (I've read them all).
