He started preaching at age 4, so it’s fair to say Rev. Al Sharpton has read more than his share of good books.

“I started reading a lot of the Bible and going over things with my bishop in Brooklyn,” says the civil-rights activist, president of the National Action Network. “My bishop, he was a voracious reader, and he’d underline things, so I picked up the habit. A lot of things I didn’t understand, but I’d keep underlining . . . When times were hard, [reading] was my escape. I’d get on the subway from Brownsville and spend the morning at Brentano’s.”

Sharpton says he’s writing a memoir, one that touches on such high points as “standing at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s grave when Barack Obama won the presidency,” and such lows as family squabbles after the deaths of James Brown and Michael Jackson. Here’s what’s in his library. — Barbara Hoffman

Judgment Days

Lyndon Baines Johnson, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Laws That Changed America

by Nick Kotz

I read it when it first came out, then re-read it about three or four months ago. The whole drama of these two guys and their egos and contrary styles — it was fascinating how they got things done without getting in each other’s way.

The Alchemist

by Paulo Coelho

A friend of mine told me I should read it, and I told him I’m not a big fable reader. But I put it in my travel bag and when I landed at JFK, I didn’t want to get off the plane because I couldn’t put it down. The whole story of searching for what you already have . . . it’s so well written.

Giants

The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln

by John Stauffer

This is a very straightforward story of how Lincoln came to support the end of slavery — and how two people from different sides of the cotton curtain came to respect each other.

Love, Power and Justice

by Paul Tillich

Some of the guys in the [Civil Rights] movement who mentored me, like Jesse Jackson, used to talk about “Tillichian theology” — that the whole quest of human history was a balance of love and power. It’s a bible of my own thinking and activism.