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Art Garfunkel's Library

artgarfunkel.com

155 pointsarchielc140 comments

I 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)

I keep a private list because sometimes people ask me for book recommendations and then I have something to refer to. I have found it's easy to forget on the spot all the things I have read.

+1. When I was writing down my list I was surprised at the books (and movies / shows / etc.) I had that I couldn't recall but was super happy to remember when I saw them.

Does 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.

I agree. I think it comes from school and parents instilling the notion that reading books is virtuous. The idea of being "well-read"

I actually think being well-read is virtuous. Feeling superior about it is what isn't. I think in your position I might have continued keeping the list but under no circumstances let anyone else know I'm keeping it.

Perhaps a public list of what one has not read is the more humble choice?

Not necessarily. It depends on the purpose(s) of the list.

What are the purpose(s) of keeping a lifetime list of books read?

Erm, 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.

Publishing your list on your website does imply vanity. I have long thought that Art held himself in high regard (he was certainly a fantastic harmonist though).

When you walk into a house you haven't visited and that house has a bookcase visible, do you look to see what's on it? Do you, perhaps, make judgments about the host or hostess's taste based on what you see? (A friend was unimpressed by a gubernatorial candidate's shelves, which ran to Reader's Digest condensed books.) Every Sunday, the New York Times Book Review has an author interview that concludes with "What's on your bedside table?"

If you have a bookcase in a common area, do you take any thought to what's in it? I confess to taking a little: a bias in favor of hardbacks on one table; biographies and letters on a shelf; etc. (And I confess to being slightly flattered that when my son was working from home during the pandemic some of those he Zoomed with were favorably impressed by the books behind him, most of them mine. I did not set up that bookshelf to be a Zoom background.)

What strikes me as odd here is simply the lack of context. If you've read a book, tell me why you read it, and tell me what you thought about it. It's great that AG read The Inimitable Jeeves, but how did it stack up against Leave it to Psmith or Uncle Fred in the Springtime?

No. The record I have kept of my reading, more or less, over the last roughly fifteen years, is in handwritten notebooks. They are accessible chiefly to me, though certainly if my wife a) can read my handwriting and b) could be bothered to do so, she would be welcome to look.

It is true that one can be vain with oneself as the sole audience, but I wonder how common that case is. I'm going to give myself a pass on that, since the purpose of the list is mostly to remind me.

Yes. The tell for these kinds of lists is if all the books are “impressive”.

I can understand that. I have a habit of doing that with things I could just be enjoying more. BUT I do love seeing other people's book lists to add more books to me "Need to read" list!

Ever pick up a book and wonder if you've already read it?

If you can't remember whether you've read it or not, then you've forgotten it, and having it on a list serves no purpose other than to "keep score".

You may as well read it again and hope it sticks this time!

If you read it, and forgot it, maybe it's not worth reading again and knowing that you can save some time!

many moons ago i used my bookshelf to impress girls. is that vanity?

I think there are the risks you described. But I keep a list to remember what I’ve read. I’m getting old and have found I don’t remember everything I’ve read decades ago.

I think it’s valuable to not use it for bragging or measuring purposes. But this is the same risk and value of any diary, I think.

I should have kept a list. Now I'm older and I can't recall 'where I read that' or worse start reading a book and realize in chapter three 'oh I read this one already.' It's even worse with video.

Audiobooks, 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.

Wow, 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?

Great 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.

I've never really gotten into audiobooks, but my pace of reading paper books has fallen off considerably lately, since I've fallen into a pattern of simply falling asleep when I pick up a book. My girlfriend loves audiobooks because she can "read" while doing chores or walking or whatever, and reads constantly. So I've been considering trying that out, and I have questions for you.

First, does this work very well for technical books? I would imagine not very well. Anytime you came across a code sample, a table of information or a diagram, I assume the audiobook rendition of it would be effectively useless. So perhaps the audio approach completely excludes technical reading?

Second, do you ever shake the feeling that having a book read to you is somehow qualitatively not as good as reading it from the page? I feel like seeing the written words on the page and the shapes of the sentences and the punctuation and having to interpret the tone and rhythm yourself is part of the experience of consuming literature. Does hearing it feel ... less to you? Is it the kind of thing that you just learn to get over, or does it stick with you? Or perhaps it was never an issue at all?

> First, does this work very well for technical books?

I just laughed imaging a professional voice actor reading out a block of code in a stately voice, complete with all the punctuation. "public function getName(Person $user)" xD

See my comment above. I did exactly that with Inventing the Future.

Maxwell didn't know how to read Mesa, of course, but I gave him the audio for how to read it. Just imagine what a CS professor would do if they read the code off a whiteboard, and do that.

Well, the difference is that there's no whiteboard. If you're reading code off a whiteboard, you can shorthand over obvious things like brackets and indentation and whatnot, whereas trying to get a listener to picture a piece of code just by verbally describing it would take a lot more. I agree with your conclusion in the other comment that a lot of code would become unwieldy, but small snippets here and there are ok.

For sure. I can't judge what a listener would grasp since I do have the text in front of me, but at least the code is mercifully short.

> do you ever shake the feeling that having a book read to you is somehow qualitatively not as good as reading it from the page?

I can't answer for OP, but I did spend a year commuting a bunch and got through ~60 books or so that way.

I went from having time for 10-15 books a year to having time for ~60 books a year, so yes, you do miss a little. But not ~50 books worth of missing. It's easily worth it.

> Second, do you ever shake the feeling that having a book read to you is somehow qualitatively not as good as reading it from the page?

Why would it be? I get where you're coming from, as I generally prefer reading over audiobooks, but it may be good to remember that story-telling began as an oral tradition. I don't see why reading a story would be superior to having someone tell you a story. I doubt The Odyssey was a lesser experience before it was written down.

We live in a time where we predominantly use and prefer the sense of sight, especially as a means of information transfer, but maybe we should let hearing have some fun too. :)

> I don't see why reading a story would be superior to having someone tell you a story. I doubt The Odyssey was a lesser experience before it was written down.

Well I don't think it necessarily has to be lesser, especially if it's designed to be verbally delivered, but it's a different art form, and it's not how most literature was created to be delivered. So it seems fairly obvious that you're going to lose something in the translation. The question is just whether or not that something that is lost is significant enough to care about.

As an example, I've noticed when reading books to my kids that certain styles of writing lend themselves very poorly to being read aloud. An example is when the writer chooses to write pieces of dialog as alternating series of quotes missing directions like "Fred said" or whatever. Just literally what is said by each person in quotation marks. It's hard to read this aloud and convey who is saying what without trying to do funny voices or adding in the "stage directions" yourself.

Funny. My books do have a lot of dialog, and when I was considering narrating them myself, I realized that it's not as easy as it looks. People do have to do the voices. A good narrator is used to it.

When you audition narrators on ACX, you provide a two-minute sample for them to read. I picked one with all three of the major characters, male and female, to hear how he did it. My guy is good.

> Well I don't think it necessarily has to be lesser, especially if it's designed to be verbally delivered, but it's a different art form, and it's not how most literature was created to be delivered.

That's a fair point. However, when I write, I often read it aloud in my head, so I'm always "checking" that things sound good verbally in a way. I'm not sure how common that is, but it does seem to me that since writing is ultimately modeled after speaking, it's intimately linked with it.

Back to the audio books, I will say that I've had a hit or miss experience. Not only does the quality depend on the writing itself, but it also depends heavily on the narrator. An example of an audio book I listened to recently which I think is fantastically done is Moby Dick narrated by William Hootkins. The narrator injects a passion and perspective that I originally did not pick up on while reading it.

I like both paper and audio books, but for me I generally feel a bit less engaged with audio, I think, for a couple reasons.

One is that someone else is deciding on the pacing. With paper books, I tend to take a lot more pauses to think things over or savor something particularly insightful, dramatic, funny, or what-have-you in the story. I could just pause the audio for the same effect, but there seems to be an inertia when someone else is reading that stops me from doing it as often.

Second is that it's a lot easier with audio to pay less than full attention. If I realize I haven't been fully listening for some period of time, either because of an external distraction or because my mind has gone off on some tangent, I'm less likely to go back because of the annoyance of trying scrub back to the exact location where I tuned out. This creates a tendency to shrug it off and keep going, which adds up to a lower level of absorption overall.

With a physical book, it's much easier to backtrack and re-read sections, and I'm a lot less likely to zone out in the first place since I have to actively read each sentence. Of course, sometimes I do realize that I've been visually 'reading' a paragraph or two while my mind is actually somewhere else, but I seem to snap out of it a lot quicker with a physical book than with audio, and it only takes a second to jump back up the page and re-read (much quicker than finding my exact point of departure in the audio).

Audiobooks do frequently come with PDF content, but depending on what you mean by "technical", there's lots of books that I wouldn't even attempt. Something code-heavy makes less-than-zero sense as an audiobook, even if the idea of hiring a voice actor to read git diffs sounds like something John Oliver would do.

As for maps and charts, well, I listen to a lot of books that fall into behavioural economics and there are definitely times where the author is talking about charts and tables where I know that I could and probably should look up whatever PDF, but since I'm currently using a mattock to remove large root bundles from what used to be a hedge, it's not happening and I forgive myself for the transgression.

I want to say that, even as a voracious audiobook reader, I still struggle with what to call it. Not just because "reading" no longer feels quite right, but because of the fucking air-quotes. Remember online dating used to be this awkward, shameful thing that was seen as "not as good" even though the outcomes were the same? That same snooty stigma still surrounds audiobooks, and if you can't tell, it kind of pisses me off for similar reasons. It all comes down to "nobody is making you do it, but don't think for a second that I'm going to let you make me feel like I'm doing something weird by doing it". (I say this knowing 100% that you mean well.)

The truth is that the fears you're expressing in the third paragraph are in fact projections of your own insecurities as a reader and listener. Reading by listening is wonderful; it's mostly the same, but interesting in the ways that it's different. If you find yourself zoning out or losing focus, either drink more caffeine or listen to something that is more interesting to you. These things are your own temporary inadequacies, not an inherent property of listening to books. If you stick with it - and choose stuff well-suited to the form - you, too, will come to love it.

ps. Good earbuds make it super easy to pause, and good player software makes it easy to jump back. Would I love to see Overdrive (the company behind Libby) make it possible to sync an ebook to an audiobook so you could see the word currently being read highlit and click to jump to an arbitrary moment? Sure, that would be one cool trick. Maybe that'll come.

I hired a voice actor, Maxwell Glick, to do the audiobooks for my two books (https://www.amazon.com/Audible-The-Big-Bucks/dp/B0BDBG5VNP/r... is the latest. Your speed is interesting, because when I was reviewing his work, I only used 1.5x. Any faster sounded like a cartoon character and I might miss nuances in the dialog, among other things.

Someone else mentioned code samples. Fortunately I only had a couple Mesa samples in Inventing the Future and I actually gave him some audio for the way to read them. My guideline was "how would a CS professor read this in class?"

There IS a "pronouncing Mesa" epilogue to the manual, which helped. But a book with a whole lot of code in it? I don't think that would work.

The books I tend to listen to share two things in common: they are in English, and they don't have large code samples. I don't doubt that there are excellent non-fiction books with source code - heck, probably some fiction as well - but listening at any speed sounds like something I wouldn't do unless my eyes were disabled.

In addition to (good) earbuds and practice listening at higher speeds, I suspect that not all pitch correction algos are created equal. If you are simply speeding up audio without correcting for pitch, it's going to sound like a cartoon even at 1.25x.

However, the main thing is concentration. I do not perceive that the words are sped up, because I am very actively listening to it while doing wrote, repetitive things. I have to stop the audio if I'm doing anything that requires any attention, computation or decision making whatsoever.

Cooking soup? No problem. Following a recipe? NOPE. Picking up vegetables? Sure. Reading ingredients? Not a chance. Biking on a path? Sure. Driving? Not a chance.

> I recommend Jabra Elite 75t.

Discontinued as of this month: "FYI Our current top pick, the Jabra Elite Active 75t, has been discontinued and is no longer available."

https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-workout-head...

This makes about as much sense as cancelling Arrested Development and Firefly.

While I'm confident that there are other earbuds, I'm tempted to hit eBay right now to pick up a spare set. They are that good.

I 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.

Or stop reading if you feel it is not worth your time.

No 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.

I 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.

Thank 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.

Yes, 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.

Yes, I used to have this compulsion as well. I still remember the book I was reading, at the age of 31, when I realized this was counter-productive and that I was slogging through things I didn't enjoy because of some misdirected completeness requirement I'd imposed on myself. Gravity's Rainbow by Pynchon. Page 90. Since then I've had a low tolerance for authors who can't be bothered to make me want to continue hearing their ideas.

Right. 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.

It's also very common for non-fiction books to have 20 pages of substance, but be padded out to 200 or more with repetition and filler.

Indeed. Read those 20 pages, say "OK, I got it," and skip the padding.

Absolutely do! I was reading John Calhoun's Disquisition on Government, which is not very long, but extremely dense, and full of those passages that sound at first as though they mean the opposite of the author's point, but work around to it by degrees. I struggled with it for a while before I realized that the wordiness was a disguise for poor or non-existent reasoning — at least, that's how it seemed to me — and went to read something better.

This is why I’m surprised by people rewatching tv shows and movies, rereading books, etc. You have a limited amount of time before you die and an, effectively, infinite amount of material to consume. Most of it is dross, but enough isn’t that there is no time to revisit.

Would you apply that opinion to music as well? Yes, it is shorter and more practical type of media, but people tend to consume it until it "wears off". Other media consumption is much more demanding, complex and immersive and it is sometimes a drag to do it more than once, but it can be worth it if it made that deep impression on you.

I don't consume a lot of media for the same reason of wasting my time, plus trial and error of finding satisfying material takes additional quantity of time I don't have. With that I justify occasional media reconsumption as I can get equally satisfying emotional response from rewatched material.

Also, why would death play any role on how many different material one needs to consume?

I'm the wrong one to ask that question of. I don't ever listen to music. It does nothing for me. I probably have Musical Anodesia.

As for death, you can't consume any more material after death.

There are shows/movies with so much depth, that you grasp some details (about the plot, characters, composition or the art design) only when watching it a second or third time.

Some things have depths they only reveal when you are ready for them.

Some things are just comfortable and fun to revisit.

Some things are even both.

What does it matter if it's self hosted? That requirement would make 99% of readers not do it. Goodreads sucks but for the majority of people will be way better.

Build your own temple

I am biased: https://j11g.com/2019/11/16/foster-how-to-build-your-own-boo...

I have been looking for something to build as a way to learn Rust and I think I just found my inspiration. Thanks!

>as there are SO MANY books and this shows that a lifetime of reading will only get you to maybe 2000 books.

I get through about 15 books a month - 2000 would be like 10-12 years, not a lifetime.

I have three little kids, I get through about one page a week.

Don't give up! They will have a phase were they wont want much to do with their uncool parent between 14-17 anyway (teenagers be like that), where you can exploit for time to read. And if not, they'll be out for college at 18 or so. After which you still have 2 or so decades you can still read at will (you might not have the money for books though, due to tuition fees and such).

So the parent commenter's generalization "at most 2000 books in a lifetime" is hardly accurate - and has been way bypassed by any bookworm I know.

Heck, one can read 2000 books before the time they have kids too. I had already read about that number by 20-25 starting from about 10-11 or so with sci-fi stuff like Verne and Asimov, and moving to literature and non-fiction soon.

I know because I need to pack them every time I move - it's the most labour intensive part of a move to take the library with us, in 100s of cardboard boxes, which then stay unopened for 3-6 months after moving to a new house.

Audiobooks my friend. Listening at +1.5x (playback speed) helps

Maybe its just me, but listening to audiobooks are absolutely impossible for me if I want to retain anything of the material I'm reading/listening to. First problem is that I seem to forget everything as soon as I stop listening, so next time I listen, I have no memory of what happened before. Second problem is that sometimes my brain just tunes it out, and I catch myself 5-10 minutes later not having to actually listened to any of it, having to go back again.

This happens both when I'm listening to audiobooks and doing something else, or when just sitting and doing nothing when listening. I don't have the same problem with reading, I can do that with high focus for hours without any problem.

>Second problem is that sometimes my brain just tunes it out, and I catch myself 5-10 minutes later not having to actually listened to any of it, having to go back again.

I think the key here is to listen while doing something undistracting and boring -- so not like driving (which requires your attention often), but rather e.g. on the treadmill or commuting in some longer distance, where you can passively zone one (eg. long train commute, not 3 subway stops).

Teach your kids the love of books and when they reach school age, they will be sitting in a cosy corner and read books. I started reading at the age of six and "plundered" the local library with eight or nine. That allowed my parents to read too (again).

All my kids love books, don't worry. But in the "one page per week" statement above, I excluded children's books. ;-)

There is more wisdom than you might think in "Cute Baby Animals" (one of the best baby books of all time)

It gets better when they're a little older. I'm now back to a book per week or so, now that they're 9 and older, and I homeschool them.

A lifetime is about 4,500 weeks.

For most people, a book is probably a multi-week investment, though lighter fare can go quicker. You can also skim, or read segments only, or quit bad books quickly. I recommend each of these where appropriate.

There are roughly 300,000 "traditionally" published books printed each year in the United States (Bowker ISBN registrations), a million or three including self-published. The US Library of Congress has 40 million catalogued titles, and Google estimated about 140 million books published (through its Google Books project) as of 2015 or so. You will sample only a tiny portion of the world's literature.

The most-read books of all time are, in rough order: The Bible, the Quran, Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung, all reporting (with various degrees of precision and accuracy) ~0.5 -- 5 billion copies), then possibly Cervantes Don Quixote, and the Harry Potter series. Three of those, at least, are principally propaganda, in the original and/or modern senses.

A well-established historical novel may sell roughly 200 million or so copies, as with A Tale of Two Cities or The Little Prince.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_books>

The Facebook (and now TikTok) homepages and/or app screens now dwarf these.

Quantity ... has its benefits, but also disadvantages. "Of the reading of books there is no end" says The Preacher in Ecclesiastes.

I recommend reading well, I've suggested Great Books as at least a good starting library, though my other suggestion is to have a good guiding question and to follow that.

Keep in mind that following recent trends, news, gossip, etc., can engross all your time and attention with very little long-term staying value. I don't remain wholly ignorant of what's happening, but I try to dip very lightly from that pitcher.

From a recent comment of mine: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32669503>

> The most-read books of all time are, in rough order: The Bible, the Quran, Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung, all reporting (with various degrees of precision and accuracy) ~0.5 -- 5 billion copies)

Surely the Bible is among the most un-read books in history as well, with all of the copies sitting in hotel rooms and on family shelves unopened.

Interesting suggestion, though it'd be interesting to see how that varies across titles with copies.

A book selling one copy which is never read would have a higher percentage-unread.

Otherwise, as total copies increase, the absolute magnitude of unread copies would likely increase proportionately.

Keep in mind that copies presented to multiple potential readers (as with, say, Gidion's Bible, typically found in hotel rooms) would likely have a greater chance of being opened at least once over its lifetime.

There's also the interesting question suggested: what book has the highest readers-per-copy ratio? And how should that be scaled by total readers? I'm inclined on general principle to suggest the ratio * log(n) where n is total copies produced. That penalises very low sales volumes, but discounts greater total print runs.

I'd suspect it would probably be a romance novel.

I 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.

I 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-othe...

Having 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.

Did 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 :)

It'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.

Even 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.

"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/

War 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.

Well 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.

Agreed. But I have literally read most of them in an afternoon at some point, and very much cannot say the same for War and Peace. =)

“I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia.” Woody Allen

Lets say this is two thousand pages altogether (half of them is War and Peace). That would be 70 pages a day. This is doable even with a full time job. Certainly more than the average person reads, but easily done for an voracious reader with a flexible schedule.

I don't know how time consuming it was to be a folk music star, but they weren't expected to workout and train choreography all day, the way pop stars are today.

Despite its reputation War and Peace is actually a pretty easy read. Perhaps except the final essay with Tolstoy philosophy of history.

My wife reads a pretty consistent 200 books per year (not audio books). She's not a very fast reader. She's just very consistent, and reads anytime she has downtime, even in waiting rooms, etc.

From ze vikipedia pages of Simon und Garfunkel:

>Garfunkel began acting, and played Captain Nately in the Nichols film Catch-22 (1970). Simon was to play the character of Dunbar, but screenwriter Buck Henry felt the film was already crowded with characters and wrote Simon's part out.[83][84] Filming began in January 1969 and lasted about eight months, longer than expected.[85][86] The production endangered the duo's relationship;

Entirely possible since they weren't making music, touring or doing fuckall but wait for their part in the movie. Garfunkel's character doesn't have particularly crazy amounts of screen time either.

Interesting.

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.

Looks like The Road by McCarthy (2006) is marked as his favourite but for some reason is not included on the favourites list.

the list has a second page, unintuitively linked from the _top_ of the first one:

https://www.artgarfunkel.com/books2.html

Ah, I missed it. Thanks!

> 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.

It's possible you read the best first. We collectively seem to have anointed plenty of books as "best" — perhaps that's where you began.

In 2020, Garfunkel read a book called "Hello Darkness, My Old Friend". I looked it up. It's not about him.

He also read a book called "Paul Simon: The Life" (1279)

> 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-Extraordina...

It'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.

One 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.

I 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

It'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.

I 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.

One 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.

I 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.

I 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.

Too 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.

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.

I 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."

>I don't often see the term narcissism misapplied that way.

We must not use the same internet.

>Not my opinion alone

As an aside, at what point does "agreeing with someone else's opinion" become a "dog pile"? It's a curious thing, how disgust gets far more firm and powerful with social proof. Before that it's "just your opinion", and we seem to hold such opinions more weakly. But when others hold it too? Well, that opinion just advanced 80% of the way to being a part of your identity.

How 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…

There 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.

I read the first book and listened to the rest of them. It's a great series one you get into it.

Art Garfunkel encases his library shelves in plastic?

That'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!

Not 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.

Some 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.

I 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.

Someone should help this fellow set up an Amazon affiliate account and link those book titles.

He 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."

Probably, like most people, he just read words ;)

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".

>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#/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#:~: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/0...

https://www.amazon.com/Origin-Species-Voyage-Beagle/dp/14000...

I have kept a book reading log on google sheets since 2007.

Highly recommended.

Top quality post! My list would be embarrassingly short..

This seems at first glance like a solid list. I never knew Garfunkel read this much.

I needed a warm fuzzy feeling this morning. This is great. Thanks :)

Remarkable 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!

Are there any other lists like this, that you know about?

I'm glad he's keeping busy!

“The Fountainhead” is starred.

Fun fact: Garfunkel majored in Architecture at Columbia University before he became one half of of the now famous folk band.

Admirable.

With 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...

In all honesty, 12 pages per day doesn't really seem that much.

Not 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

That might explain why he's read relatively few books in all that time.

Hmm, 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.

I read the hobbit and around the world in 80days in English (not my native tongue) as a kid. Those two took me 5 days. The bible (nih) took me 27. Lotr trilogy took me six days. Book reading time depends on how boring it is. You could totally read a midsized book in a day. That is more than a hundred pages. This leaves you with 9 days of not reading at all.

> 12 pages per day for 10 years?

Now I feel bad about constantly complaining that I don't read enough. 12 pages a day is easy, even for heavier works.

That honestly impressive how much you could read with just 12 pages a day.

Edit: Okay, a small script that grabs the first three years of books, with a bug, or two, somewhere, tells me that you actually need to read about 120 pages per day, not 12. That makes more sense. It's ten times more, but still do able.

> 12 pages per day for 10 years?

I don't know exactly what I average per day. But certainly way more than a measly 12 pages.

What'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.

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