Fifteen Books

     Are you well read?  I am certainly not, though there has been a concerted effort to go from the stage of reading less than six new books a year (let's call that from 2000-2009) – though to be fair, I did re-read a number of books during that period – to actually reading more than one per month; the goal has become to read at least four books per month.  If I could keep up the rate I have going for this year (I cannot, because it is inflated with many short books), I would read 936 books over the course of a decade.  That seems like a lot of reading to me.  I'll be happy if I pass 1,000 total before I die.  Well, no I won't, because the specter of death will be forever before me until I'm dead, at which point all of everything just won't matter.  But I will be momentarily pleased that I managed to take in some of what the written word had to offer in my time amongst the living.
     But for as much as I may be reading this year, it occurs to me that I may not be reading the books that everyone is, or rather the ones they have already read (because I wasn't much of a reader before I took a decade off).  There are so many books out there that I sometime wonder how – school assignments aside – we end up reading the same material.  I know that I only came to read Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park (1990) because the paperback release had a stand at the front of Crown (or was it Walden?) Books in the Orland Square mall for something close to six months.  Somewhere along the line I figured that people must be buying it (presumably reading it as well) if they kept the stand up.  So I borrowed a copy, ruined it via a leaky bottle of contacts solution, replaced the original and bought one for myself and finished it in what was for me short order.  Then the movie ruined everything – including, I assume, people's desire to read the novel.
     What I have come up with here is my best guess at the fifteen books I have read which I suspect most of the people with whom I associate (for better or worse) have read.  No particular order.
☞  The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
☞  The Hobbit
☞  Fahrenheit 451
☞  A Doll's House
☞  The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
☞  The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
☞  Treasure Island
☞  The Great Gatsby
☞  The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
☞  Lord of the Flies
☞  The Glass Menagerie
☞  Heart of Darkness
☞  The Pearl
☞  Ethan Frome
☞  The Red Badge of Courage
     But I am more curious as to what books other people assume that other people have read.  Feel free to chime in with your thoughts.