Top 5 Books You Pretend You've Finished at Dinner Parties

The doorstops everyone quotes, nobody finishes, and we all quietly agree not to ask follow-up questions about.

1. 1

   Infinite Jest — David Foster Wallace

   Owning it is a personality, reading the endnotes is a lifestyle, and claiming you finished it is a bluff nobody can call because nobody else did either.

2. 2

   Ulysses — James Joyce

   Everyone knows the 'yes I said yes' ending, which is suspicious, because almost nobody reaches it by actually reading the 700 pages before.

3. 3

   A Brief History of Time — Stephen Hawking

   The best-selling unread book of all time, and most people bail out somewhere around the light cones.

4. 4

   Gravity's Rainbow — Thomas Pynchon

   You can drop 'Pynchon' with confidence because nobody at the table can tell you what happens in it either, including the people who finished it.

5. 5

   Capital in the Twenty-First Century — Thomas Piketty

   Everyone can say 'r > g' with total authority, and that one formula is carrying a lot of people through 700 pages of tables.