MARILYN MONROE'S MARKING : HONOURS REVIEW SNIPPET

CRITIC'S CRAVES : '' Some Like It Literary '' : MARILYN MONROE born a century ago - placed a high value on self-improvement : '' IF you are ignorant, books won't laugh at you,'' she said poignantly.

The best-seller list bows to Reese Witherspoon. Sarah Jessica Parker judged the Booker Prize. And Kate Hudson reared up recently in a New Yorker video praising Gabriel Garcia Marquez's '' One Hundred Years of Solitude.''

But long before actors put the Botox in BookTok there was Marilyn Monroe, who might be celebrating her own hundred years on Monday had her life  not ended at 36 in a haze of barbiturates and jumbo tabloid type in 1962.

There is little new to say about her films or fashion. But what of her literary influence?

In MARILYN AND HER BOOKS : The literary Life of Marilyn Monroe, Gail Crowther attempts to debunk Monroe's dumb-blonde reputation through the Murphy door of her private library.

[ A few selections from which will be auctioned by Jullen's in Jun, along with the front gates to the house where she died - welcome, guests! and a used pot of rogue that at this writing had already been bid up to $3,500.

The star owned over 400 books, moving them with her from dwelling to dwelling. They range widely in genre from '' The Little Engine That Could,'' by Wary Piper, possible bearing her juvenile scrawl, '' Look Homeward Angel '' and other works by Thomas Wolfe, to Russian literature [ she hoped to play Grushenka in a movie version of '' The Brothers Karamazov '' ].

There is a copy of '' The Tales of Rabbi Nachman ,'' by Martin Buber - Monroe converted to Judaism when she married the playwright Arthur Miller - and four copies of Khalil Gibran's '' THE PROPHET. ''

Sensitive about not graduating from high school, Monroe studied world literature in an adult-extensive program at U.C.L.A.

'' If you are ignorant, books won't laugh at you,'' she said poignantly.

!WOW! thanks Alexandra Jacobs.