Bragging writes: how presidential candidates try to impress reporters with their reading lists.

• Author: Kendall, Brent

IN THIS PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION SEASON, everything is happening faster. The primaries have been moved up, consultants hired sooner, and, because of the crowded field and mushrooming expense of running a campaign, fundraising has begun earlier. Consequently, the press is racing to handicap the candidates, subjecting them to the various litmus tests that once occurred much later in the cycle. Anything that can yield a clue is accorded instant significance. There have even been articles analyzing several of the candidates' wives (conventional wisdom so far: Hadassah Lieberman and Elizabeth Edwards are campaign assets; Teresa Heinz Kerry is a bit of a head case).

So it's no surprise that there's also early interest in candidates' answers to the question, "What's your favorite book?" This may seem an innocuous query, but it's actually one of the more treacherous a candidate can answer. In January, for instance, ABC's George Stephanopoulos asked Sen. John Edwards to name his favorite book. Edwards replied that it was I.F. Stone's The Trial of Socrates. On the surface, that seemed to hit just the right note. It's plausible that an ex-trial lawyer like Edwards would enjoy a book about the ultimate historical trial, and by choosing that particular title--a serious inquiry written for a popular audience--Edwards conveyed a sense of weightiness without appearing snobbish. But the choice also opened him up to criticism. Conservative commentator Bob Novak fumed on CNN's "Capital Gang": "That's incredible! Did Senator Edwards know that Izzy Stone was a lifelong Soviet apologist? Did he know of evidence that

Stone received secret payments from the Kremlin?" Novak's rant illustrated how the slightest stumble on the book question can come back to hurt a candidate.

What a candidate chooses to read may seem like a small thing. Yet a person's literary tastes can be very revealing, as anyone who's ever scanned a stranger's bookshelf can attest. Book choices are especially prized by reporters, who use them as material for the narratives they write--narratives that often define candidates in the eyes of voters. Remember Michael Dukakis? His phlegmatic 1988 campaign was perfectly symbolized by his choice of vacation reading: a book entitled Swedish Land-Use Planning. Even if you knew nothing else about the Massachusetts governor, this tidbit suggested he was solution-oriented, practical to a fault, and probably not the sort of guy who'd be a lot of fun to have a beer with. Which is, of course, exactly the person the Democrats got.

Because the book question is so fraught with peril, candidates have increasingly...