I note some things about the list. Every single text on it was published before I was born. The list is dominated by men. There is not a single person of color to be found. On a Goodreads list of the top 50 most popular high school books, there is exactly one black author, Zora Neale Hurston. There is no James Baldwin, no Richard Wright, no Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, Sandra Cisneros, Junot Diaz, or Gabriel Garcia Marquez. No Chinua Achebe, no Amy Tan, no Haruki Murakami.