Trashy book amnesty
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At 3.1m characters, some 560,000 words and 1,400 pages, it's tempting to lie about having read War and Peace. After all, what are the chances the target of your fib has ploughed through the Russian masterpiece themselves?
Why do so many of us lie about our literary conquests? It's down to a conquest of a different kind - psychologists say many people hope that pretending to have read heavyweight books will make them more sexually attractive.
According to a World Book Day survey, 1984, War and Peace and Ulysses are the favoured white lies.
 |  One would certainly not want to bring this up at dinner parties, but on my bedside table right now, there's Sleep With Me by Joanna Briscoe and Nicci French's Killing Me Softly  John Sutherland |
If these are thought to have the power to impress, what about books we do read but are too embarrassing to own up to?
The impressively well-read John Sutherland (he's knocked off Tolstoy's greatest hit several times) is an author, academic and critic, but even he has a few skeletons in his literary closet.
"Wild horses wouldn't get me to say this in public, but I am rather partial to Jilly Cooper. I think it's partly that she has a gap in her front teeth like me, and it stares out from her books," he admits under interrogation.
Lying in bed is Sutherland's favourite place to indulge this passion - and Cooper is not his only guilty pleasure.
"One would certainly not want to bring this up at dinner parties, but if, for instance, you look at my bedside table right now, there's Robert Crace's Demolition Angel, Sleep With Me by Joanna Briscoe, The Long Rain by Peter Gadol and Nicci French's Killing Me Softly."
Pedigree airport novels, the lot.
"You're not going to write that are you? I'm an academic with a reputation to uphold, remember."
Sorry, but it wouldn't be much of a confessional if we didn't.
Private shame
Sutherland strongly believes the departure lounge is the place to discover people's inner literary secrets. They let down their guard, he says, just in case the book they choose may be their last.
As a frequent flyer, his comfort fiction of choice is the latest pulp crime novel, the creation of "publishing machine, not man".
He is in good company. Books no-one will praise in public have long flown mysteriously off the shelves to be enjoyed in private. Sutherland mentions Mickey Spillane, whose pulp novels were derided in the 1940s but incredibly popular.
"It's strange how embarrassed you get about what you're reading or enjoying. There's always this feeling that there's this school mistress over your shoulder grading you," says Sutherland.
"There's really only three private acts left and reading is one of them - what one does in private is very different to what one will own up to in public.
"Of course, I'm only speaking for myself here. All other academics, I'm quite sure, will only go to bed with Finnegan's Wake and Proust."
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