I know this is humor but: a. the original poll this article is based on says that 1% of the US population reads 50+ books a week; 1% of 3.3*10^8 people is stil

I know this is humor but: a. the original poll this article is based on says that 1% of the US population reads 50+ books a week; 1% of 3.3*10^8 people is still a lot of people. b. some books are much easier to read than others, are your friends just kicking back once a week with a competently-written potboiler in a genre they've been reading half their life, or are they reading one abstruse 800-page tome after another? Or are they reading kid's books to a child in their life? Lying's certainly a possibility too, but so's marking something as "read" when you actually abandoned it somewhere before the end - and that's a spectrum too; when I read Pynchon's "Mason & Dixon" I abandoned it about ten pages before the end but I'd still say I "read" it. If I'd only gotten ten pages in I wouldn't say that.