Art Garfunkel once named his 159 favourite books of all time
Over the years, Art Garfunkel has developed quite a reputation for being a formidable bibliophile. While he did not grow up in a literary household, Garfunkel’s education at Columbia University introduced him to the writings of literary pioneers from all over the world. His literary interests defined his artistic sensibilities and also led him toward writing poetry.
In 2017, Garfunkel extended his writing scope by penning a memoir titled What Is It All But Luminous: Notes From An Underground Man. It’s an unconventional document about his life which touches upon widely discussed topics like the dissolution of Simon and Garfunkel as well as more mundane subjects such as his taste in books and music.
While talking about his memoir in an interview with Rolling Stone, Garfunkel said: “I don’t put myself into the category of ‘rock star writing his biography’. That’s because we live our lives by falling into experiences. Things happen to us. Something you do takes hold of you and then you do a lot of it. And it has a name.”
Not only is he not a fan of rockstar autobiographies, but he also is not impressed by books written about Simon and Garfunkel. I read one many years ago. He commented: “What can I say? It didn’t capture … I think the main thing about us is that we’re good. We’re very good. We take two very different people, Artie and Paul, who have very different natures and found a fusion. It’s a cute trick.”
Garfunkel’s personal website has a log of all the books he has read in his life. The total number is more than 1000, but he has narrowed his favourites down to a tight selection of 159 essential works. “My favourite author would be Tolstoy,” Garfunkel once said. “He’s the best.”
These books have been selected by Garfunkel over the course of decades of dedicated running, which explains the eclectic range of works highlighted. It contains the works of titans such as James Joyce and Marcel Proust as well as popular titles like ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’
Even among these talented writers, Garfunkel has a few preferences that stir his heart like no other. “I like this author Jean Rhys,” he said. “I just love her stuff. She always writes the same lonely, spare, haunted girl. Makes me think of Laurie Bird, my old girl.”
Check out the full list below.
Art Garfunkel’s favourite books:
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau – ‘The Confessions’
- Erich Fromm – ‘The Art of Loving’
- P.D. Ouspensky – ‘In Search of the Miraculous’
- L.N. Tolstoy – ‘War and Peace’
- Philip Roth – ‘Portnoy’s Complaint’
- Emily Brontë – ‘Wuthering Heights’
- Johann Wolfgang Goethe – ‘The Sorrows of Young Werther’
- Garrett Mattingly – ‘The Armada’
- Bill Moyers – ‘Listening to America’
- Charlotte Brontë – ‘Jane Eyre’
- L. N. Tolstoy – ‘Anna Karenina’
- Albert Schweitzer – ‘J.S. Bach, Vol. 1’
- Jane Austen – ‘Pride and Prejudice’
- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – ‘The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes’
- Robert A. Caro – ‘The Power Broker’
- Henry James – ‘Portrait of a Lady’
- John S. Shelton – ‘Geology Illustrated’
- Saul Bellow – ‘Humboldt’s Gift’
- C.G. Jung – ‘Modern Man in Search of a Soul’
- Charles Chaplin – ‘My Autobiography’
- Stephen King – ‘The Shining’
- Bulfinch – ‘Mythology’
- Charles Darwin – ‘The Origin of Species’
- Robert M. Persig – ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’
- Erik Erikson – ‘Childhood and Society’
- Marcel Proust – ‘Swann’s Way’
- Plato – The Last Days of Socrates Euthyphro, The Apology, Crito, Phaedo
- Fydor Dostoevsky – ‘The Idiot’
- Robertson Davies – ‘Fifth Business’
- Jack Kerouac – ‘On the Road’
- Jean Rhys – ‘Good Morning, Midnight’
- Richard Price – ‘Ladies’ Man’
- Jean Rhys – ‘Voyage in the Dark’
- Thomas Hardy – ‘Jude the Obscure’
- Jonathan Swift – ‘Gulliver’s Travels’
- Isaac Bashevis Singer – ‘The Slave’
- Jean Dorst – ‘The Life of Birds, vol. 1’
- Marcel Proust – ‘Within a Budding Grove’
- Edward Gibbon – ‘The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’
- J. P. Donleavy – ‘The Destinies of Darcy Dancer, Gentleman’
- James Joyce – ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’
- Gary Zukav – ‘The Dancing Wu Li Masters’
- David Halberstam – ‘The Powers That Be’
- Saint Augustine – ‘Confessions’
- Miguel de Cervantes – ‘Don Quixote’
- Virginia Woolf – ‘A Room of One’s Own’
- Baldesar Castiglione – ‘The Book of the Courtier’
- D.M. Thomas – ‘The White Hotel’
- Leon Edel – ‘Henry James – The Middle Years: 1882–1895’
- Johan Huizinga – ‘The Waning of the Middle Ages’
- Honoré de Balzac – ‘The Black Sheep’
- Robert G. Weisbord – ‘Ebony Kinship’
- William James – ‘The Varieties of Religious Experience’
- Thornton Wilder – ‘The Bridge of San Luis Rey’
- Emil Ludwig – ‘Napoleon’
- Henry David Thoreau – ‘Walden’
- Peter Gay – ‘The Enlightenment (The Rise of Modern Paganism)’
- W. Somerset Maugham – ‘The Razor’s Edge’
- Vladimir Nabokov – ‘Lectures on Literature’
- James Joyce – ‘Ulysses’
- J.D. Salinger – ‘Nine Stories’
- Thomas Mann – ‘The Confessions of Felix Krull Confidence Man’
- L.N. Tolstoy – ‘What is Art?’
- Iris Murdoch – ‘A Severed Head’
- William M. Thackeray – ‘Vanity Fair’
- Thornton Wilder – ‘The Ides of March’
- Constantin Stanislavski – ‘An Actor Prepares’
- Harriet Beecher Stowe – ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’
- Lucretius – ‘On the Nature of the Universe’
- Marcel Proust – ‘The Guermantes Way’
- Lao Tsu – ‘Tao Te Ching’
- L.N. Tolstoy – ‘Confession’
- Richard Ellmann – ‘James Joyce’
- Herodotus – ‘The Histories’
- Edith Wharton – ‘The House of Mirth’
- Virgil – ‘The Aeneid’
- Julian Jaynes – ‘The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind’
- William Kennedy – ‘Ironweed’
- Vladimir Nabokov – ‘The Enchanter’
- Harold C. Schonberg – ‘The Lives of the Great Composers’
- David A. Stockman – ‘The Triumph of Politics’
- Thomas Hobbes – ‘Leviathan’
- Carrie Fisher – ‘Postcards from the Edge’
- Marcel Proust – ‘Cities of the Plain’
- Rudyard Kipling – ‘Just So Stories’
- Peter Ladefoged – ‘Elements of Acoustic Phonetics’
- Mark Twain – ‘Life on the Mississippi’
- Fyodor Dostoevsky – ‘Notes from the Underground’
- George Eliot – ‘Middlemarch’
- Francis Parkman – ‘The Oregon Trail’
- Charles Dickens – ‘Bleak House’
- E.L. Doctorrow – ‘Billy Bathgate’
- Brenda Maddox Nora – ‘The Real Life of Molly Bloom’
- Sanche de Gramont – ‘Epitaph for Kings’
- Sigmund Freud – ‘Civilization and Its Discontents’
- Mark Twain – ‘Innocents Abroad’
- Sylvia Plath – ‘The Bell Jar’
- Thomas Mann – ‘The Magic Mountain’
- Fredric Dannen – ‘Hit Men’
- Will and Ariel Durant – ‘The Story of Civilization VIII: The Age of Louis XIV’
- Thomas L. Friedman – ‘From Beirut to Jerusalem’
- Marcus Aurelius – ‘The Meditations’
- Marcel Proust – ‘The Captive’
- Oscar Hijuelos – ‘The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love’
- John Updike – ‘Rabbit, Run’
- William Styron – ‘The Confessions of Nat Turner’
- H.G. Wells – ‘A Short History of the World’
- Swami Prabhavananda – ‘The Sermon on the Mount according to Vendanta’
- Nathaniel Hawthorne – ‘The House of Seven Gables’
- Camille Paglia – ‘Sex, Art and American Culture’
- Hermann Hesse – ‘Demian’
- Franz Kafka – ‘The Trial’
- Daneil Defoe – ‘A Journal of the Plague Year’
- Jean Rhys – ‘After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie’
- Henry Kissinger – ‘Diplomacy’
- Gustav Janouch – ‘Conversations with Kafka’
- Samuel Butler – ‘The Way of All Flesh’
- Stendahl – ‘The Red and the Black’
- Robert D. Kaplan – ‘Balkan Ghosts’
- Gustave Flaubert – ‘Flaubert in Egypt’
- Charles and Mary Lamb – ‘Tales from Shakespeare’
- Keith B. Richburg – ‘Out of America’
- David Denby – ‘Great Books’
- Patrick Süskind – ‘Perfume’
- Ralph Ellison – ‘Invisible Man’
- D.H. Lawrence – ‘Sons and Lovers’
- Arthur Golden – ‘Memoirs of a Geisha’
- Russell Banks – ‘Cloudsplitter’
- Dan Kindlon, Michael Thompson – ‘Raising Cain’
- Zora Neale Hurston – ‘Their Eyes Were Watching God’
- Jacques Barzun – ‘From Dawn to Decadence’
- Jakob Walter – ‘The Diary of a Napoleonic Foot Soldier’
- Elizabeth Gaskell – ‘Wives and Daughters’
- Harold Nicolson – ‘Good Behavior’
- Charles Bukowski – ‘Post Office’
- Paul Berman – ‘Terror and Liberalism’
- Tracy Chevalier – ‘Girl With a Pearl Earring’
- Bob Dylan – ‘Chronicles, vol. 1’
- Laurens van deer Post – ‘A Story Like The Wind’
- Anthony Trollope – ‘The Way We Live Now’
- W. Somerset Maugham – ‘Of Human Bondage’
- Geoff Emerick – ‘Here, There and Everywhere’
- Fareed Zakaria – ‘The Future of Freedom’
- J.P. Donleavey – ‘The Ginger Man’
- Jonathan Franzen – ‘The Corrections’
- Isaiah Berlin – ‘Russian Thinkers’
- Ian McEwan – ‘On Chesil Beach’
- Jonathan Lethem – ‘Motherless Brooklyn’
- Jose Saramago – ‘The Gospel According to Jesus Christ’
- Reinhold Niebuhr – ‘Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic’
- Booth Tarkington – ‘The Magnificent Ambersons’
- Ivan Goncharov – ‘Oblomov’
- Akira Iriye – ‘The Origins of the Second World War in Asia and the Pacific’
- Christopher Caldwell – ‘Reflections on the Revolution in Europe’
- Richard Wright – ‘Native Son’
- Wilkie Collins – ‘The Woman in White’
- Kathryn Stockett – ‘The Help’
- Doug Glanville – ‘The Game From Where I Stand’
- E.L. James – ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’
