I just read an article http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,25341-2647599,00.html about being able to talk about books we haven’t read. Though the article was written about people in an academic world, I found the following to be wrong:

“We live in a society . . . in which reading still remains the object of a form of sacralization”, particularly where certain “canonical texts” are concerned: it is practically forbidden not to have read these.”

I don’t think any of us probably expect each other to have read anything. Is there any common denominator book? I might risk the assumption that everyone who went to college read Gatsby, but almost certainly that doesn’t apply to the American population at large. Maybe everyone read The Telltale Heart in grade or high school?

Is it useful to have a common cultural “home base”? What do you think it is for our generation? (And will it be The House on Mango Street for some other generation?)