Presidential candidates are now in the business of revealing their favorite books.

Wesley Clark: “‘I like Hemingway and I like a lot Jewish writers (such as) Saul Bellow,’ he said. The former general also expressed a preference for the novels of John Updike and Pat Conroy.”

Howard Dean: “Dean’s favorite books: All the King’s Men, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion; also Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed and David McCullough’s Truman (‘It is one of the books that has had the most impact on me in the last ten years’).”

John Edwards: The Trial of Socrates by I.F. Stone.

Bush: The Raven: A Biography of Sam Houston, by Marquis James; The Good Life and Its Discontents: The American Dream in the Age of Entitlement, by Robert J. Samuelson; The Dream and the Nightmare: The Sixties’ Legacy to the Underclass, by Myron Magnet.

The Globe and Mail excerpts Atwood’s 2004 Kenserton Lecture. She speaks on how Orwell has influenced her and her own personal dystopia taxonomy, seen in Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake.

Updates on literary film adaptations: Colin Farrell starring in A Home at the End of the World, Kirsten Dunst as Sugar in The Crimson Petal and the White (with Curtis Hanson directing), Julianne Moore as Burroughs’ mom in Running with Scissors, and, perhaps the most apt matchup for safe-and-sane mediocrity, Ron Howard and Akiva Goldman behind The Da Vinci Code.

The Oreganian covers a local reading contest. Apparently, Sue Gatton read 482 books and 157,672 pages in one year. Unfortunately, Gatton’s too busy reading that she doesn’t have the time to summarize her thoughts on the books.

And Kurt Vonnegut’s promoting Linux!

Posting will be light over the next 1.2 days, with scattered showers, assorted links, and minimal involvement. I’ll be spending the next day and a half sorting out pantalettes (you know who you are). And a few other things. Feel free to visit some of the fine folks on the left. Or, if you’re really bored, organize a bunch of people and head over to a football stadium. At the stroke of twelve, remove your shirts and reveal the painted words ,”I AM TMFTML,” preferably with Justin Timberlake in attendance.

The Chronicle follows up with the Book Babes, coralling a few responses but giving us pretty much what we know already, with several “publishing insiders” refusing to speak on the matter or not returning calls. Ferlinghetti, however, weighs in against it.