Reading habits would seem to be relevant enough to someone’s biography, especially if that person is a writer. In his study “Built of Books,” Thomas Wright attempts to reconstruct the contents of Oscar Wilde’s library, which was dispersed and auctioned off between his imprisonment and trial. It’s worth knowing (though hardly surprising) that Wilde read the Greek and Roman classics, Shakespeare, Hegel and some French pornography, but difficulties arise when Wright tries, in a self-described moment of “quixotic madness,” to make the book a partial autobiography, in the belief that if he read everything Wilde had read, Wilde would become a “Socratic mentor, who would help me give birth to a new self.”

Forging a deep link between criminals and their books can be even more quixotic. Ed Sanders, in “The Family,” tells us that one of Charles Manson’s favorite books was Robert Heinlein’s “Stranger in a Strange Land,” but we’re also told that Manson was barely literate. Both John Hinckley Jr. (Reagan’s would-be assassin) and Mark David Chapman (the murderer of John Lennon) have been connected to “The Catcher in the Rye,” Hinckley by having a copy in his hotel room, Chapman by calmly reading the book outside the Dakota apartment building while waiting for the police to arrive after he shot Lennon. But it’s hardly surprising that a book that has sold well over 35 million copies has occasionally fallen into the hands of criminals.

The psychiatrist Fredric Wertham got things about as wrong as can be when he argued, in “Seduction of the Innocent” (1954), that the fact that prisoners and juvenile delinquents read “crime comics” meant that comics were causing, or at least stoking, their criminal tendencies. Current evidence suggests that if criminals read at all — and let’s not forget how many prisoners are functionally illiterate — then they read much the same books as the rest of us, business and self-help books included. This, anyway, was the conclusion reached by Glennor Shirley, who in 2003 conducted a survey of prison librarians for the American Library Association and learned that prisoners’ favorite writers included Stephen King, Robert Ludlum, Danielle Steel and “all authors of westerns.” Admittedly, she is referring to their reading habits in prison rather than outside. (Here I might add that when I learned one of my short stories had appeared in an anthology used in a prison literacy program, I was relieved to know I was part of the solution, not part of the problem.)

The self-help nature of some prison reading can be disturbing. Scandal arose in Britain two years ago when it was revealed that prisoners were being allowed to read “inappropriate” books, including the memoirs of other, more successful criminals, stories of prison escapes and, inevitably, “Mein Kampf.” (More cheeringly, Avi Steinberg, the author of the recent memoir “Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian,” reports a vogue for Anne Frank’s diary among some female prisoners he worked with.)