When I was growing up, there was a common culture of books you were expected and assumed to have read. Not any more

I twitter not, neither do I tweet. I have probably said this wrong, and I don't care. I can't stand all that buzzing about, and anyway I couldn't bear to confine myself to the stipulated however many it is words, or characters. Whatever. So it was rather a surprise to be told that I have been the subject of a minor tweety storm, having upset a number of young Australians by allegedly accusing them of illiteracy. I had, of course, done no such thing.

They were responding to an article I had published in the Sydney Morning Herald, which some subeditor had entitled "Young People Have Lost Art of Reading Together", which is neither elegant nor very clear. If you recognise that the stress falls on the "Together", you will guess what I was driving at. If, however, in your haste to text your friends and issue the next tweet, you suppose that the stress falls on "Reading," you might get irate enough, almost, to read my article. So the tweets poured in: "I do so read, so there." "I've read a lot of books, and so has one of my mates." "Who does this guy think he is anyway?"

I'd begun by supposing that we were back in the year 1974, and playing a game of Humiliation (later made popular in David Lodge's Changing Places) in which you earn points by naming books that you haven't read and which you think the other players have. (I used to do well by not having read The Wind in the Willows.) In Lodge's novel, a competitive young lecturer, playing the game with his English Department colleagues, startles them by announcing that he hasn't read Hamlet, gleefully gathers a bushel of points, and is fired a few weeks later. How can you employ a lecturer who is this illiterate?

In 1974, you would have won a lot of points if you hadn't read these books:

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)



Mind you, I was lucky: I lived through a time when it was great to read. There were so many books that you just had to read, which would have been read by everyone you knew. Not merely read, though, but digested and discussed. We formed not merely our opinions but ourselves on them. There was a common culture – or, more accurately, a common counter-culture – which included music, art and film. If there was some faddishness in this, and a concomitant homogenisation of taste, there was the palpable upside of having plenty of people with whom to share one's enthusiasms.

This is common enough with music: as our parents had Gershwin and Cole Porter, we had the Stones and the Beatles, and our children have garage, or hip-hop, or whatever it's called. Yes, all of us could sing When I'm Sixty-Four, or Honky Tonk Women. But what was really uncommon, much more than we would have realised, was that we could all sing from the same books as well. And I don't mean merely the hottest novels and books of poetry, but philosophy, psychology, feminism, politics, and what is now, alas, called media studies. And there was nothing provincial about the list: the writers come from the US, England, Australia, France, Germany, Canada.

Of course I realise that what we read in Ivy League colleges and at Oxford was not representative of the general population. But the point still stands: within our middle-class, educated world there was a canon, which wasn't limited to Shakespeare, Jane Austen and Scott Fitzgerald. You could assume people had read the hot contemporary books; when they hadn't, it occasioned not merely puzzlement, but disapproval.

So: let me ask – you'll have seen this one coming – if we asked a bunch of literate university students today what they had read, what they had all read – what would be the answer? I suspect the answer would be: Nothing. Not that young people don't read, but they don't read together. They haven't got, as we had, a common culture: books to devour and discuss and be formed by.

Perhaps things happen earlier these days? In my adolescence we had few common reading experiences, just the usual shared TV shows and sports teams to support. Whereas today, while two 20-year-olds might search in vain for a list of books they were both excited by, two 13-year-olds would be babbling away within seconds. Harry Potter? Cool! Stephanie Meyer? Awesome! I don't wish to sound scornful about this, nor reflexively to regard such reading as dumbing down. Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, which is very widely read within this age group, is one of the classics of our time, for both children and adults.

I have read, and quite enjoyed in my superannuated fashion, both Rowling and Meyer. But there is a long way to go from sharing these escapist enthusiams, and entering a complex and demanding literary culture. Indeed, and ironically, such reading might just retard the entry into such a culture, though it certainly doesn't need to. You don't have to read fancily, or be unrelentingly highbrow, to love literature and to take it seriously.

I wish that the pleasure of reading, across the whole spectrum of literature, in all its variety, were part of a shared culture amongst young people today. But it isn't, whatever my irate tweeters may say. Poor them.