Surveys of UC Berkeley freshmen conducted in 1987, 1997, and 2007 regarding books students read for pleasure have been released and--surprise!--we have enduringly terrible taste.

Just kidding!

Tastes in literature ranged from high-brow (1997's The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky) to low-brow (1997's How Stella Got Her Groove Back, Terry McMillan; 2007's numerous Harry Potter titles and The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown); pretentious (1987 and 1997's The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand) to classic (1997 and 2007's 1984, George Orwell); romantic (Jane Austen and Amy Tan totally own) to the old stand-by Tortured Teenage Soul novel, J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye.

What's clear is that Cal students, supposedly the cream of the crop intellect-wise, scarcely look past their high school reading lists for inspiration. Is it a bad sign our list of favorite books shares several titles with that of my ten-year-old brother? J.K. Rowling is pretty amazing, but we should probably be reading books not related to 17-year-olds learning magic, if only because Harry's jailbait for most of us.