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Art Garfunkel's Library
- wyclif 4y agoArt Garfunkel encases his library shelves in plastic?
- a2800276 4y agoThat's exactly what I was thinking :D It's made my day that a frivolous "list of every book Art Garfunkel read since the 60's" is rated so high!
- pmontra 4y agoNot the shelves but books, apparently not all of them. I saw collectors of comics doing it to preserve them and be able to resell them later at a higher price, never for books.
- mrweasel 4y agoSome people are insanely overprotective of books. I see the point of a signed copy, first editions of some rare old books and things like that, but I've seen people go nuts about cheap paperbacks. A friend of mine borrowed a copy of 1984 I had laying around. She accidentally folder one of the pages or something, I don't recall. I don't think I've ever heard anyone apologies so much, but she REALLY loves books. It was just paperback I picked up because it was dirt cheap... I ended up giving it to her, that way it was her own book she damaged ever so slightly.
- karaterobot 4y agoI knew a woman who did this, for allergy reasons she said. I don't know, but she had thousands of books, all in plastic wrap.
- janvdberg 4y agoI love this! Everyone should keep a list like this (self-hosted). It also makes me a little bit sad, as there are SO MANY books and this shows that a lifetime of reading will only get you to maybe 2000 books. Choose wisely what you read.
- Loic 4y agoOr stop reading if you feel it is not worth your time.
- tomcam 4y agoNo one who downvoted this is a serious reader. I would much rather jettison a bad book or movie than waste the one life I have on material that doesn’t make my life better in some way.
- StormChaser_5 4y agoI think it may be being down voted as it can he read as saying stop reading entirely rather than just stop reading a particular book, ie an attack on reading as an activity. Doubt the comment was meant that way though and I agree with you, dropping a particular book if it's not rewarding is something I do although I do still struggle with myself when doing so.
- Loic 4y agoThank you for your comment. We have 1000's of books in our house. We read a lot and I would have not imagined a second that my comment could be interpreted this way. So, yes, drop the specific book and enjoy another one is my advice.
- gnuj3 4y agoYes, this is something I had to learn over the years. I always had this notion that I HAD to finish something (book, movie) to be able to express the opinion on it. Now, if I dont enjoy it I just stop reading and when I’m asked what did I think of it I simply answer that I didnt finish because xyz. It gives you so much more time resulting in reading something you actually enjoy.
- AlbertCory 4y agoRight. More and more nowadays with non-fiction, I read a few chapters, realize I've already heard everything the author has to say, and drop it. Life's too short.
- oh_my_goodness 4y agoHe gets through Ulysses pretty good: "278. Jan 1984 James Joyce Ulysses * 1921 783 pp." "279. Jan 1984 Jim Harrison Farmer 1976 160 pp." "280. Jan 1984 Michel de Montaigne Travel Journal 1580-81 175 pp."
- gnuj3 4y agoProbably, like most people, he just read words ;)
- hybby 4y agoRemarkable that a new book hasn't entered his "favourites" (top 100) in 22 years. And that his favourite books are ones he read longest ago - the favourites ranking tracks with date read fairly consistently!
- unethical_ban 4y agoThis seems at first glance like a solid list. I never knew Garfunkel read this much.
- AlbertCory 4y agoThere are about an equal number of "I read that" and "Did I read that? Or just part of it?" If you go into a used bookstore (remember those?) you find very few copies of Swann's Way but plenty of copies of the other books in In Search of Lost Time. Apparently it's common to read the first one and never go any further. I can't claim to have even done that.
- jyriand 4y agoI read the first book and listened to the rest of them. It's a great series one you get into it.
- cleandreams 4y agoAdmirable.
- kwijibob 4y agoI have kept a book reading log on google sheets since 2007. Highly recommended.
- 5mv2 4y agoInteresting. Number of the 100 of his favorite books written before year X: 1500 6 1900 29 1950 24 1990 41 2022 0 → it's all pretty recent, which is surprising for a Taleb reader → but 0 was written in the last 30y! Also, 0 of the books he read in the last 30y made it to his 100 favorites list. When I did the same exercise, 50% of my favorite books were readings from early adulthood. It scared me: am I not learning anymore? I hope I'm not the only one.
- gnuj3 4y agoLooks like The Road by McCarthy (2006) is marked as his favourite but for some reason is not included on the favourites list.
- Jtsummers 4y ago> Also, 0 of the books he read in the last 30y made it to his 100 favorites list. He hasn’t ranked his favorites. He has listed them in chronological order of reading. He has a second page of favorites which are more recent.
- JKCalhoun 4y agoIt's possible you read the best first. We collectively seem to have anointed plenty of books as "best" — perhaps that's where you began.
- gnuj3 4y agoI started keeping a text file with all things I read and another one for audiobooks. Since Obsidian came out I use it to edit my file and link books together. I use the following format: [[title]] by [[author]] (date finished) That way I generate a separate file for each book where I can keep notes and my rating. I also keep a separate file for each author so I can easily link all the books/short stories/essays etc by that author in one place. Obsidian is bloody awesome.
- podviaznikov 4y agoI just store them in apple notes now. Also I usually save a bit more info by default. https://podviaznikov.com/readings/what-do-you-care-what-other-people-think https://podviaznikov.com/readings/what-do-you-care-what-othe...
- gnuj3 4y agoHaving txt files is just more portable for me in terms of any future software changes. It’s a backup for lifetime essentially as I’m not tied to Apple Notes nor Obsidian. I save more by default too, I have a template that imports when I add new book to my collection and I just fill it with info/tags and my notes/quotes and other interesting stuff related to the book. My favourite thing about Obsidian is that you can interlink all the notes together. Its super useful if you’re referring to other books in your notes or if you have literature notes on different books.
- marincounty 4y ago
- crb 4y agoIn 2020, Garfunkel read a book called "Hello Darkness, My Old Friend". I looked it up. It's not about him.
- kleiba 4y agoHe also read a book called "Paul Simon: The Life" (1279)
- jpmattia 4y ago> In 2020, Garfunkel read a book called "Hello Darkness, My Old Friend". I looked it up. It's not about him. It turns out it does involve him: It's by Art Garfunkel's college roommate, who goes blind in Junior year. (I have not read it yet, it's on my list.) https://www.amazon.com/Hello-Darkness-Old-Friend-Extraordinary/dp/1642934976 https://www.amazon.com/Hello-Darkness-Old-Friend-Extraordina...
- bjarneh 4y agoTop quality post! My list would be embarrassingly short..
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- panosfilianos 4y agoAre there any other lists like this, that you know about?
- belter 4y agoWith all due respect to Art Garfunkel, whose work I greatly admire...I would suggest to tone it down a little bit :-) and maybe change the text on the page 1968 to 1978 from "We are pleased to present a listing of every book Art has read since 1968." to maybe "We are pleased to present a listing of every book Art bought, opened once, perused, read a few pages and some he read since 1968..." :-)) From 1968 to the end of 1978 you have approximately 3650 days...And since the page has the somewhat unusual take of also prominently listing the number of pages of each book...I was able to gather the total number of pages amounts to 43,612 pages. 12 pages per day for 10 years? Uhmmm...
- ignite 4y agoWhat's your point? Do you think 12 pages a day is a high number? I'm sure I've exceeded that over a similar period. Likely anyone who enjoys reading regularly has.
- kachnuv_ocasek 4y agoIn all honesty, 12 pages per day doesn't really seem that much.
- belter 4y agoNot if you combine those years with Studying Art, Graduating, Studying Law, Helping others Graduate by reading their own works to them, Rehearsing, Touring, Recording, Doing Movies :-) As I said, a career I greatly admire. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_Garfunkel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_Garfunkel
- KerrAvon 4y agoThat might explain why he's read relatively few books in all that time.
- jcynix 4y agoHmm, instead of 12 pages per day, that's just 84 pages per week. Nothing to "tone down" IMHO, because that's easily managable. We have about 5K books at home (not pages, books) which we bought and read over 40 years (not owning a TV set over that time ;-) and reading sixty to one hundred pages per evening isn't that hard to accomplish for a book lover.
- olvy0 4y agoDid he actually read War and Peace, The Great Gatsby, Catch 22, Candide, The Picture of Dorian Gray, a Malcolm X biography and two other books during the single month of Feb 1969?? I find that a tad hard to believe... But whatever. I'm a pretty fast reader myself, so I'll take that as a challenge / inspiration for myself :)
- dsr_ 4y agoIt's entirely possible that he had nothing else to do but read that month. If there was no album currently in production and no tour going on -- both of those things seem plausible for that month -- then it was all available time. The Great Gatsby is short. Candide is shorter. The Picture of Dorian Gray is fairly short. Each of them might have been read in a day or less. War and Peace is famously long, but at a normal reading pace of 200 words per minute it will only take 40-45 hours -- say, 10 days.
- Thrymr 4y ago"Catch 22" was also presumably read for work, he played Nately in the film version that was in production in 1969: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0065528/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0065528/
- Lio 4y agoEven if he was on tour, it’s conceivable that he had a lot of time in transit to kill. I’m great at reading in cars but trains and planes are ok for me.
- stephencanon 4y agoWar and Peace aside, most of those are pretty breezy reads, so if you’re laid-up sick for a couple weeks with nothing else to do it would be easy to blow through them all.
- bslorence 4y agoWell and honestly most of War and Peace is pretty easy and pleasant to read as well (I'm setting aside the philosophy-of-history stuff) -- there's just so much of it.
- supersrdjan 4y agoI used to keep a list like this (more modest though) but I stopped once I realized it's demeaning both to me and the books. The problem was that the list had no other purpose except as a kind of trophy case. I felt proud about my list, as if finishing a book is an achievement, as if reading is a sport, as if reading a lot makes you better than those who read less. I was disgusted by my own vanity, and moreover, considered it as proof that I haven't really improved my character from all that reading. Now I stopped maintaining a list and I stopped keeping a mental account of how many pages or books I read. The result is that, though I rarely finish any book I pick up, I probably spend more time in total reading, and I learn way more because I don't hesitate spending a lot of time appreciating or grappling with, say, a single paragraph of text. #itsnotarace (BTW I don't want to imply that this is true for everybody. And I mean if your list has notes that's totally different)
- lelandfe 4y agoDoes keeping a record of things necessarily imply vanity? It seems to me that your problem was with your own feeling toward the list - “I felt proud about my list” - and not the list itself. Where does that feeling come from? It might be worth exploring.
- jrochkind1 4y agoNot necessarily. It depends on the purpose(s) of the list. What are the purpose(s) of keeping a lifetime list of books read?
- lelandfe 4y agoErm, keeping track of how far you are through an author’s works (I know a guy who did this to work through Michener’s entire catalogue over many years), seeing your reading taste evolve (I’ve been trying to read more non-fiction), graphing your reading over time (are you meeting your goals for yourself?) and thousands and thousands of other great reasons. It’s not masturbatory to create goals for yourself, and lists are a great way to track those goals. Having that data even allows future insight into things you haven’t even thought of yet.
- peteforde 4y agoAudiobooks, borrowed for free from my library and listened to via the excellent Libby app, have been a life-line over the past four years. I went from 3-4 books a year to 3-4 books a week, sometimes more. I listen in the bathroom, while exercising, cooking, cleaning, cycling, gardening. My listening speed is typically 1.75x for dense prose and hard science, all the way up to 2.5x for fiction and biographies. The secret is to score a great pair of earbuds; I recommend Jabra Elite 75t. The further the sound is from your ear, the harder it is to parse speech at high speed. You don't start at 2.5x, obviously; start at 1.25x and increase every day or two until you start to zone out. You'll be pleasantly shocked at how quickly you'll ramp up. 1x sounds like the performer overdosed on benzos. In the past year, I've listened to everything Haruki Murakami has written, the entire Wheel of Time series (4.4M words vs 19D5H), and several hundred others. For free. And yes, I still read paper books, too. Sometimes.
- metafunctor 4y agoWow, that's a lot of books! Assuming 10% of those books are, in some way, in your opinion, better than the other 90%, what would you say were the best couple of dozen books you've listened to? How much would you say the performer affects your perception of the book?
- peteforde 4y agoGreat questions. I'm going to compile a list for you, and I don't do anything half-way so I hope you check back in a few days and let me know what you liked later on. Great performers tend to be great, at the risk of being reductive and tongue-in-cheek. There are certainly mediocre talents out there, but most people working in that (rapidly growing) industry are really great. I do see names popping up so there's probably awards being given out for audiobook performances at this point. However, the real question you didn't ask is how big of a deal is it for the author to read their own books. Truth be told, if you don't know the author's voice today, chances are the content would be better served by hiring an excellent voice talent. For the authors whose voices you do know... it's hard to imagine a David Sedaris book being read by anyone except David Sedaris (except Tracy Ullman, which will be relevant when my recommendations come). It's not just biographies that need to be read by their authors to be properly enjoyed; everyone from Neil deGrasse Tyson to John Waters bring so much to their books. Whereas I'd pay good money to never listen to Neal Stephenson read anything again. Great dude, but he should stick to writing. There are even books that are made better because they are read by their author. See: Werner Herzog's The Twilight World.
- Lio 4y agoHow dark does that library look in the photo? You’d need (cough) bright eyes to read in there![1] :D On a less Dad joke line, a good number of those books are out of copyright. So it would be fun to link them to free versions if/when they become public domain. 1. Sorry have a tendency to rabbit on occasionally…
- subpixel 4y agoI don’t care to find it but a journal entry from Art Garfunkel’s web site crossed my radar many years ago. I recall thinking “wow, this is some next-level narcissism here.” This list (and the royal we!) produce a similar reaction.
- eddieroger 4y agoI don't doubt he is a narcissist, but I think it's much more likely that someone else is maintaining the site for him, and thus the royal "we," as opposed to him speaking in first person. If you go to the Contact page, it references his management agency - I would assume they maintain the site, and he just asked for his library to be posted. Still narcissism, just maybe slightly less.
- javajosh 4y agoToo often "narcissism" is used to describe a quality of someone we don't like or admire who seems to like and admire themselves. Skimming this library, Garfunkel is certainly not lacking in intellectual confidence! It implies to me that he wants to understand the world, from many angles at a deep level, and yeah to do that you need confidence that might create unpleasant feelings in an observer. The discomfort is caused by envy, also regret and loss, because we all start out with boundless confidence, and only lose it over time, mainly to avoid being called out by our cool friends who discovered the social value of giving up on hard problems and difficult achievements.
- mistermann 4y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_mentality https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_mentality This could be one of the many variables that holds humanity at an artificially low local maxima.
- subpixel 4y agoI don't often see the term narcissism misapplied that way. Regardless in this case I admire Art Garfunkel, the singer. But he clearly has delusions of grandeur. Not my opinion alone, to wit this Washington Post review of one of his memoirs: "The subtitle of Art Garfunkel's new memoir, " Notes From an Underground Man," echoes Dostoyevsky's "Notes From Underground" and Richard Wright's story "The Man Who Lived Underground" — both serious works of literature. Garfunkel’s book, however, is a splattering of 30-plus years of handwritten thoughts, lists, travel notes, bad poetry, confessions, snarky digs, platitudes and prayers gussied up for publication in different fonts and sizes. Reading it is like rummaging through a huge junk drawer of the mind."
- moomin 4y ago“The Fountainhead” is starred.
- Dracophoenix 4y agoFun fact: Garfunkel majored in Architecture at Columbia University before he became one half of of the now famous folk band.
- jyriand 4y agoIt's amazing how many times Chareles Darwin's book is mistitled: "The origin of species" The correct title is "On the origin of species".
- jasode 4y ago>It's amazing how many times Chareles Darwin's book is mistitled: "The origin of species" The correct title is "On the origin of species". Well, it seems understandable that the "On" disappeared from the title when people are referring to the book. See that the original 1859 edition de-emphasized the preposition "On" in the title with a small font: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Origin_of_Species#/media/File:Origin_of_Species_title_page.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Origin_of_Species#/medi... The original publisher subsequently dropped "On" from the title in the 1872 6th edition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Origin_of_Species#:~:text=The%20sixth%20edition%20was%20published%20by%20Murray%20on%2019%20February%201872%20as%20The%20Origin%20of%20Species%2C%20with%20%22On%22%20dropped%20from%20the%20title https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Origin_of_Species#:~:te.... The shorter "The Origin of Species" has gained so much popular currency that even new editions of that book omit the "On" from the title: https://www.amazon.com/Origin-Species-150th-Anniversary/dp/0451529065/ https://www.amazon.com/Origin-Species-150th-Anniversary/dp/0... https://www.amazon.com/Origin-Species-Voyage-Beagle/dp/1400041279/ https://www.amazon.com/Origin-Species-Voyage-Beagle/dp/14000...
- fortran77 4y agoI'm glad he's keeping busy!
- superb-owl 4y agoIt's odd to see his transition from mysticism and philosophy in the 70s (Jung, Gurdjieff, Watts, Proust, Plato), to Republicanism today (Scarborough, O'Reilly, Rand). I don't want to generalize too much (he also read RBG's autobiography) but there's definitely a move towards politics.
- boomboomsubban 4y agoIt's also odd for a person who performed a benefit concert for George McGovern to have three favorite books written by Henry Kissinger. Paul Simon apparently befriended Kissinger though, which is even more bizarre.
- marginalia_nu 4y agoI do think it makes more sense to move from the general to the particular and past to present than in the opposite direction. Postponing Plato in particular would be a colossal mistake.
- gwbas1c 4y agoOne of the best things I did was read a memoir from a US president who I didn't vote for (and generally didn't approve of.) Nothing "changed my mind," but it was very useful to understand the his point of view. Turns out this politician cared very deeply about issues that I really care about, and if the side that I normally support was willing to cooperate, we could have moved more quickly on these issues.
- brocha 4y agoI was a bit confused too but the book by O'Reilly is about hunting Nazis after WW2 (apparently he has a whole series), Scarborough's is about the Truman Doctrine and how it shaped US foreign policy (problematic but hardly Republican propaganda), and Rand, well he reads a fuck ton of classics. Not really saying he isn't political, but he's not over here reading Rush Limbaugh' autobiography
- karaterobot 4y agoOne of my biggest fears is that people will look at the books I read and assume they know how I view the world. I like to read things I don't necessary know about or agree with already.
- itintheory 4y agoSomeone should help this fellow set up an Amazon affiliate account and link those book titles.
- tirwander 4y agoI needed a warm fuzzy feeling this morning. This is great. Thanks :)