Most frequently mentioned

• L. M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables series (18 mentions)
• Louisa May Alcott (12)
• Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little House series (11)

  “Anyone interested in getting copies for a child or looking into them personally should make a point of getting the set with the Garth Williams illustrations, which are wonderful. And by all means, stay away from the horrible rip-off television series, which totally distorted the stories and the characters. The change that incensed me most was adding a son to the family, since you couldn't have a television family made up all of girls." Helen Bergman Moure ’89

• Jane Austen (9)

  “Every few years or so, I go through an Austen binge and read all of them in a row. So does my grandmother -- we try to coordinate our binges so that we can have a hearty discussion.” Elizabeth Rose ’90

• Madeleine L' Engle, especially A Wrinkle in Time/Austin family series (8)
• C.S. Lewis, especially The Chronicles of Narnia (7)
• The Diary of Anne Frank (7)
• Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre and Villette (6)
• “Dr. Seuss” (6)

  “The gentle subversiveness of these books is what I found -- and find -- most appealing.” Erika M. Sutherland ’86

• Frances Hodgson Burnett, especially The Secret Garden (5)
• E. B. White, especially Charlotte's Web (4)

Mentioned thrice

• All-of-a-Family, Sydney Taylor
• Margaret Atwood
• Annie Dillard
• George Eliot, Middlemarch, Mill on the Floss
• Nancy Drew series
• Louise Fitzhugh, Harriet the Spy
• Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
• Thomas Hardy, Tess, Jude the Obscure
• Tony Hillerman, New Mexico mysteries
• Tove Jansson, Moomintroll series
• Barbara Kingsolver, The Bean Trees, Pigs in Heaven, Animal Dreams
• Ursula LeGuin
• Anne McCaffrey, Dragonrider series, The Power Trilogy
• Thomas Mann
• Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• A.A. Milne, Winnie the Pooh
• Flannery O' Connor
• Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
• Shakespeare
• Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
• Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety, Angle of Repose and Beyond the 100th Meridian
• J.R.R. Tolkien
• Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, War and Peace
• Edith Wharton

Mentioned twice

• Nicholson Baker (Haverford '79)
• Peter Beagle
• Jorge Luis Borges
• A.S. Byatt, especially Possession
• Italo Calvino
• Julio Cortazar
• Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, Bleak House
• Albert Camus, L ' Etranger, La Peste
• Michel Foucault
• Ursula Hegi, Stones from the River
• James Joyce, Ulysses, The Dubliners
• Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth
• Rudyard Kipling, Stalky and Co.
• Scott O' Dell, Island of the Blue Dolphins
• Jay McInerny
• Catherine MacKinnon, Only Words, Feminism Unmodified
• Armistead Maupin, Tales of the City
• Edna St. Vincent Millay
• Toni Morrison
• Mary Oliver, poetry
• Dorothy Parker
• Katherine Paterson, Bridge to Terabithia
• Elizabeth Peters, Amelia Peabody mysteries
• Sylvia Plath, poetry and The Bell Jar
• Arthur Ransome, Swallows and Amazons series
• Rainer Maria Rilke
• Dorothy Sayers
• Sophocles, Theban plays (Oedipus cycle)
• Anthony Trollope, Palliser novels and Chronicles of Barsetshire
• Jeanette Winterson
• Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Dalloway

Mentioned once

• Angela Carter
• Willa Cather
• A College of Magics, Caroline Stevermer '77
• Horatio Hornblower series, C.S. Forester

  “Avoid the modern knockoffs -- Rammage and Jack Aubrey aren't fit to shine Hornblower's shoes.” Alison Huettner ’78

• The Faerie Queen, Edmund Spenser
• P.D. James
• Sarah Orne Jewett
• Jamaica Kincaid, Lucy
• Maus and Maus: A Survivor's Tale II, Art Spiegelman
• The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing
• The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn

  “It has served as a foundation for my conceptualization of the world ever since Jo Ellen Parker ’75 assigned it in my freshman English section, ‘Order and Disorder,’ in 1985.” Christine De Maria ’89

• Tristram Shandy, Laurence Sterne