The Book List: A peek at Art Garfunkel's library – from Twain to Freud

Every Wednesday, Alex Johnson delves into a unique collection of titles

Bright eyes: the musician is a keen reader and has kept a public record of every work he has read since 1968 (Getty)

The End of the Road by John Barth
The Art of Loving by Erich Fromm
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Johann Sebastian Bach, an Introduction to his Life and Works by Russell H Miles
In Search of the Miraculous by PD Ouspensky
Boyhood with Gurdjieff by Fritz Peters
The Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
My Life and Hard Times by James Thurber
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

Art Garfunkel is a particularly keen reader and on his website publishes a list of every book he has read since June 1968. Above is the very start of what he calls his “Library”, running from June to November 1968. In an interview with The New Yorker in 2008, he emphasises that: “I avoid fluff … The stuff that men are always reading on planes. I don’t read that.” Below is January to March 1992:

The Art of Courtly Love by Andreas Capellanus
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
An Outline of Psycho-Analysis by Sigmund Freud
The Vintage Mencken by HL Mencken
The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym by Edgar Allan Poe
The Sermon on the Mount according to Vedanta by Swami Prabhavananda
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
A Short History of the World by HG Wells
The Truly Disadvantaged by William Julius Wilson

‘A Book of Book Lists’ by Alex Johnson, £7.99, British Library Publishing

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