…as a topic for an essay for students who feel that they have not had “sufficient opportunity to. convey important information” about themselves.
Simply making a list, even an annotated list, is unlikely to be the best way to convey ‘important information about yourself’.* Not impossible- I can imagine a clever selection of books with equally clever annotations that together tell a story that shows the student to be particularly imaginative / creative / insightful, and that could be precisely the sort of student Harvard would welcome. I think it would be a very high-risk strategy to attempt something like that.
*also, technically a list is not an essay