Thursday, January 24, 2008

The Garfunkel Library

There's a column in The New Yorker's "Talk of the Town" this week about Art Garfunkel's reading list. He's been keeping this list since the 1960's. I believe the total of books he's read is now over 4,000 strong. That's a huge number, but I'll bet some of the lit bloggers I frequent can top it. The list is interesting--it isn't all Tolstoy and Plato, Bob Woodward's Wired is snuck in somewhere around 1984 (the year, not the novel). As the New Yorker wryly states, a steady flow of royalty checks creates enough down-time to fulfil anyone's reading wish list. I wonder what Paul Simon's list would look like, he wrote Simon and Garfunkel's songs and presumably takes a higher cut in the sharing of those royalties.

Here is the link: http://www.artgarfunkel.com/library.html

2 comments:

Emily Barton said...

Most interesting is his "favorites" list, huh? BTW, I always liked Garfunkel better than Simon, despite the fact Simon did all the writing. I think he was under appreciated for both his intellect and his vocal abilities.

IM said...

I was happy to see "The Shining” on the list," and I'm going to reread it next. To me that proves Steven King is legit, look at all the competition he has--Tolstoy, Plato, not to mention the ones I can't spell.