one rick gekoski, mourning the supposed fact that we don't all read the same books anymore, lists books every literate speaker of english had to have read, circa 1974:

 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1953) 

JD Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (1953) 

William Golding, The Lord of the Flies (1954) 

Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (1955) 
Allen Ginsberg, Howl (1956) 
Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving (1956) 
Jack Kerouac, On the Road (1957) 
Norman O Brown, Life Against Death (1959) 
RD Laing, The Divided Self (1960) 
Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (1961) 
Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) 
Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962) 
Pauline Reage, The Story of O (1965) 
Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965)
Desmond Morris, The Naked Ape (1967)
Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice (1967) 
Norman Mailer, Miami and the Siege of Chicago (1968)
Carlos Castaneda, The Teachings of Don Juan (1968) 
Arthur Janov, The Primal Scream (1970) 
Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch (1971) 
Robert M Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycling Maintenance (1974)

first of all, it's funny to think that today's old fuddy-duddy, today's grumbling old reactionary bemoaning today's kids and their loose ways, was yesterday's freewheeling counter-culture hipster, as the titles make clear. and second: doesn't this list indicate that there's a problem with everyone reading the same books? janov as a touchstone of shared culture? that old shyster castaneda? i personally would whine about golding's totalitarian/hobbesian fable, but i guess you could hold some kind of torch for its modest literary merits, and for its propaganda value in making sure every high school student capitulates to authority without further ado. there are a few good books in there, but a lot stuff that had a very short shelf-life (and a lot that deserved to but didn't because we all read it in 1974). really it's great that y'all (well me too) shared these psychological fads or half-baked theories, now entirely superseded or discredited.  but really we'd have been much better off deciding that there is absolutely no reason that we should all read the same books, and very good reasons we shouldn't: for example that peer pressure elevates slop into official ideology. 

ok ok! i love one flew over the cuckoo's nest and the autobio of malcolm x. i don't doubt that the second sex is good and important, within limitations. marcuse and heller are defensible.