Credit: Far Out / Columbia Records

Jordan Potter

Sat 18 November 2023 21:30, UK

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As one half of Simon and Garfunkel, Art Garfunkel offered his absorbing vocal talents to a host of immortal folk-rock classics throughout the 1960s, supporting his early career partner Paul Simon. The charming New York double act joined the likes of Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell in bringing traditional American folk into the modern day, ushering in the prolific singer-songwriter wave of the early 1970s.

Simon and Garfunkel rose to prominence in 1964 after releasing their debut album, Wednesday Morning 3AM. Most notably, the album was home to the first version of ‘The Sound of Silence’, one of Simon’s most popular lyrical triumphs. Through the next six years, the pair grew from strength to strength with warming vocal harmonies and songwriting genius.

Although they were a double act, Simon handled almost all of the songwriting and instrumentation, while Garfunkel rested on the merit of his heaven-sent vocals. Perhaps the closest Garfunkel came to writing a song for the duo was when he penned the poem ‘Canticle’ as a rewrite of Simon’s Scarborough Fair/Canticle cut, ‘Side of A Hill’.

It is unclear whether Garfunkel’s lack of songwriting was a result of Simon’s eclipsing poetic grasp or a general indifference to lyricism. All the same, Garfunkel is passionate about the written word, and when not on stage, he can usually be found with a book in hand.

In June 1968, incidentally the year Simon and Garfunkel released Bookends, Garfunkel decided to start listing every book he read. The singer kept this up through his and Simon’s acrimonious 1970 break-up and four reunions over the subsequent four decades.

It’s fair to assume Garfunkel is still reading as voraciously as ever and logging each title as he goes. However, in October 2013, he let the public in on his little game, listing the shelf-splintering 1195 books he had read over the past 45 years on his website. Fortunately for us, Garfunkel has distilled the list to just 157 favourites.

It’s still not a bitesize reading list, but one can get a snapshot of the singer’s refined taste in literature. Alongside dense classics like Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace and James Joyce’s Ulysses are some more culturally contemporary page-turners like Stephen King’s The Shining and Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James.

“I read for the reading pleasure, not for the gold star,” Garfunkel told Nick Paumgarten of The New Yorker in a past interview. “Reading is a way to take downtime and make it stimulating. If you’re in the waiting room of a dentist’s office and don’t want to twiddle your thumbs, you turn to Tolstoy.”

Without further ado, we present Art Garfunkel’s 157 favourite books, from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to E.L. James.

Art Garfunkel’s favourite books:

• The Confessions – Jean-Jacques Rousseau
• The Art of Loving – Erich Fromm
• In Search of the Miraculous – P.D. Ouspensky
• War and Peace – L.N. Tolstoy
• Portnoy’s Complaint – Philip Roth
• Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
• The Sorrows of Young Werther – Johann Wolfgang Goethe
• The Armada – Garrett Mattingly
• Listening to America – Bill Moyers
• Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
• Anna Karenina – L. N. Tolstoy
• J.S. Bach, Vol. 1 – Albert Schweitzer
• Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
• The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
• The Power Broker – Robert A. Caro
• Portrait of a Lady – Henry James
• Geology Illustrated – John S. Shelton
• Humboldt’s Gift – Saul Bellow
• Modern Man in Search of a Soul – C.G. Jung
• My Autobiography – Charles Chaplin
• The Shining – Stephen King
• Mythology – Bulfinch
• The Origin of Species – Charles Darwin
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance – Robert M. Persig
• Childhood and Society – Erik Erikson
• Swann’s Way – Marcel Proust
• The Last Days of Socrates Euthyphro, The Apology, Crito, Phaedo – Plato
• The Idiot – Fydor Dostoevsky
• Fifth Business – Robertson Davies
• On the Road – Jack Kerouac
• Good Morning, Midnight – Jean Rhys
• Ladies’ Man – Richard Price
• Voyage in the Dark – Jean Rhys
• Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
• Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift
• The Slave – Isaac Bashevis Singer
• The Life of Birds, vol. 1 – Jean Dorst
• Within a Budding Grove – Marcel Proust
• The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Abridged) – Edward Gibbon
• The Destinies of Darcy Dancer, Gentleman – J. P. Donleavy
• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce
• The Dancing Wu Li Masters – Gary Zukav
• The Powers That Be – David Halberstam
• Confessions – Saint Augustine
• Don Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
• A Room of One’s Own – Virginia Woolf
• The Book of the Courtier – Baldesar Castiglione
• The White Hotel – D.M. Thomas
• Henry James – The Middle Years: 1882–1895 – Leon Edel
• The Waning of the Middle Ages – Johan Huizinga
• The Black Sheep – Honoré de Balzac
• Ebony Kinship – Robert G. Weisbord
• The Varieties of Religious Experience – William James
• The Bridge of San Luis Rey – Thornton Wilder
• Napoleon – Emil Ludwig
• Walden – Henry David Thoreau
• The Enlightenment (The Rise of Modern Paganism) – Peter Gay
• The Razor’s Edge – W. Somerset Maugham
• Lectures on Literature – Vladimir Nabokov
• Ulysses – James Joyce
• Nine Stories – J.D. Salinger
• The Confessions of Felix Krull Confidence Man (The Early Years) – Thomas Mann
• What is Art? – L.N. Tolstoy
• A Severed Head – Iris Murdoch
• Vanity Fair – William M. Thackeray
• The Ides of March – Thornton Wilder
• An Actor Prepares – Constantin Stanislavski
• Uncle Tom’s Cabin – Harriet Beecher Stowe
• On the Nature of the Universe – Lucretius
• The Guermantes Way – Marcel Proust
• Tao Te Ching – Lao Tsu
• Confession – L.N. Tolstoy
• James Joyce – Richard Ellmann
• The Histories – Herodotus
• The House of Mirth – Edith Wharton
• The Aeneid – Virgil
• The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind – Julian Jaynes
• Ironweed – William Kennedy
• The Enchanter – Vladimir Nabokov
• The Lives of the Great Composers – Harold C. Schonberg
• The Triumph of Politics – David A. Stockman
• Leviathan – Thomas Hobbes
• Postcards from the Edge – Carrie Fisher
• Cities of the Plain – Marcel Proust
• Just So Stories – Rudyard Kipling
• Elements of Acoustic Phonetics – Peter Ladefoged
• Life on the Mississippi – Mark Twain
• Notes from the Underground – Fyodor Dostoevsky
• Middlemarch – George Eliot
• The Oregon Trail – Francis Parkman
• Bleak House – Charles Dickens
• Billy Bathgate – E.L. Doctorow
• Nora – The Real Life of Molly Bloom – Brenda Maddox
• Epitaph for Kings – Sanche de Gramont
• Civilization and Its Discontents – Sigmund Freud
• Innocents Abroad – Mark Twain
• The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
• The Magic Mountain – Thomas Mann
• Hit Men – Fredric Dannen
• The Story of Civilization VIII: The Age of Louis XIV – Will and Ariel Durant
• From Beirut to Jerusalem – Thomas L. Friedman
• The Meditations – Marcus Aurelius
• The Captive – Marcel Proust
• The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love – Oscar Hijuelos
• Rabbit, Run – John Updike
• The Confessions of Nat Turner – William Styron
• A Short History of the World – H.G. Wells
• The Sermon on the Mount according to Vendanta – Swami Prabhavananda
• The House of Seven Gables – Nathaniel Hawthorne
• Sex, Art and American Culture – Camille Paglia
• Demian – Hermann Hesse
• The Trial – Franz Kafka
• A Journal of the Plague Year – Daniel Defoe
• After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie – Jean Rhys
• Diplomacy – Henry Kissinger
• Conversations with Kafka – Gustav Janouch
• The Way of All Flesh – Samuel Butler
• The Red and the Black – Stendahl
• Balkan Ghosts – Robert D. Kaplan
• Flaubert in Egypt – Gustave Flaubert
• Tales from Shakespeare – Charles and Mary Lamb
• Out of America – Keith B. Richburg
• Great Books – David Denby
• Perfume – Patrick Süskind
• Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
• Sons and Lovers – D.H. Lawrence
• Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
• Cloudsplitter – Russell Banks
• Raising Cain – Dan Kindlon, Michael Thompson
• Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston
• From Dawn to Decadence – Jacques Barzun
• The Diary of a Napoleonic Foot Soldier – Jakob Walter
• Wives and Daughters – Elizabeth Gaskell
• Good Behavior – Harold Nicolson
• Post Office – Charles Bukowski
• Terror and Liberalism – Paul Berman
• Girl With a Pearl Earring – Tracy Chevalier
• Chronicles, vol. 1 – Bob Dylan
• A Story Like The Wind – Laurens van deer Post
• The Way We LIve Now – Anthony Trollope
• Of Human Bondage – W. Somerset Maugham
• Here, There and Everywhere – Geoff Emerick
• The Future of Freedom – Fareed Zakaria
• The Ginger Man – J.P. Donleavey
• The Corrections – Jonathan Franzen
• Russian Thinkers – Isaiah Berlin
• On Chesil Beach – Ian McEwan
• Motherless Brooklyn – Jonathan Lethem
• The Gospel According to Jesus Christ – Jose Saramago
• Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic – Reinhold Niebuhr
• The Magnificent Ambersons – Booth Tarkington
• Oblomov – Ivan Goncharov
• The Origins of the Second World War in Asia and the Pacific – Akira Iriye
• Reflections on the Revolution in Europe – Christopher Caldwell
• Native Son – Richard Wright
• The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
• The Help – Kathryn Stockett
• The Game From Where I Stand – Doug Glanville
• Fifty Shades of Grey – E.L. James

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