And Pride and Prejudice so is chick lit.

And what do the predispositions of thirty-something bloggers for major magazines and almost-mainstream Republican presidential candidates tend to prophesy? I’m almost afraid to ask.

Or perhaps you are both mistakenly combining a variant of the “Big Chill fallacy” (everyone was an alternative/hippie in the relevant time frame) with an incomplete understanding of the principle that “there are more ways of being different than being the same” that governs what type of thing actually shows up on aggregated top 10 list. We might be surprised at the mainstream “tripe” that what would show up from a similar exercise in the ‘60s/70s/80/90s.

The hippies all morphed into yuppie accountants and their children despise them and have burned all their books.

Or perhaps tripe like Da Da Vinci Code is now mainstream rather than alternative.

A few observations:
How similar the lists actually are across a broad swath of colleges.
As mentioned above how many times a book shows up, period, is more interesting than its “SAT score”.
Where/if the Bible shows up in your list is surely an interesting marker.
Where/if Harry Potter shows up in your list is surely an interesting marker. (The ubiquity of the book, often at the top (it is at Harvard & Princeton), is a testament to something.)
I would like to see the schools ranked by “The Devil Quotient” – basically where Harry Potter is placed relative to the Bible. Max DQ is HP #1, Bible not in top 10, Min DQ is the reverse.
It would be interesting to see the full lists of the few schools with almost none of their top 10 on the top 100. (Amherst was 1, had only Cat’s Cradle, Hendrix only had HP, there might be a few with none on th top 10).
There are a lot more interesting characteristics of colleges to correlate with the lists than SAT score.

Actually, probably more the smart wannabees who are trying to get themselves into a lifetime position on wingnut welfare.

As for comment 7, I would guess those results have more to do with cultural bias in the SAT’s than anything else.

As for comment 13, I’m sure college kids are reading all kinds of alternative lit, but if you ask a 1000 of them what their favorite books are, the most common ones will be traditional stuff that a couple hundred of those kids have read.