the cultural canon

I was looking at an ex-pat friend's bookshelf the other day, and it struck me that lots of the people I know have the same range of authors on their shelves. For Christian books, for novels, for poetry, for popular science and travel writing, we all read the same books. Even for cookbooks everyone reads Delia and fish-heads read Rick Stein.

The American canon is different. We share a language (almost) but we don't share our books. Isn't that interesting?

In France there's a "cultural canon", too, but the authors are different again of course.

So it seems to me that globalisation hasn't yet effaced the national canons of culture.

(Now when does that Potter book come out ?)

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