NIGHT-TABLE READING

Who reads what between the sheets

ELIZABETH MCGOVERN (actress): The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, by Milan Kundera (Penguin). "It makes you feel the experience of being behind the Iron Curtain, and strikes a universal chord."

ROBERT VENTURI (architect): The Raj Quartet, by Paul Scott (William Morrow). "I like it because it's so tedious. It absorbs you, but not too much. And I enjoyed the TV series."

WHOOPI GOLDBERG (comedian): King Jesus, by Robert Graves (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). "With all the zealots we have now, it would be nice to know what the real story might have been. He was not this celibate guy for thirty-three years."

MICHAEL KORDA (editor and writer): Exiles, by Michael J. Arlen (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). "I'm reading it because along with my own Charmed Lives it's the best book about a certain kind of childhood. I'd forgotten what it was like."