Literary generation gap

Remember the canon? No, not that cannon, the other canon. The cool, counter-cultural 1970s canon that situated "Howl" as a crown jewel among the likes of Lord of the Flies and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance? If you don't remember because you weren't born or still in diapers, then pity poor little you. Rick Gekoski of the Guardian wants all you kids out there in T.V. land to know how culturally impoverished your generation is because it lacks its very own list of "essential" books that everyone has read. That's right! All you've got is your Twilight and your Tweets!

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.

Not only do today's wippersnappers lack an essential reading list, they also don't share a common literary culture (besides the lightweight Twilight and Harry Potter series):

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.

Perhaps Gekoski doesn't know that the characters in Twilight actually read a Robert Frost poem. If that's not a common literary culture, then what is?