Unfortunately, the books are not easily defined by a search for author or genre since they are kinda all over the map. I suppose a custom tag as you suggested would work, but I was hoping to be able to write a search that could match against a csv of the title/author since I already have access to that.
That Reading List plugin however seems to be mostly what I was looking for! I can add the titles to the list and view just those titles I need to read for school. It doesn't seem to filter the list of authors/tags on the side bar, but I can view the list and create a virtual library on the resulting search, and that takes care of that. Thanks for the tip
Now...to read all these buggers.