Garfunkel's reading list from 1968 onwards is available online, and it's strong on the classics. But who else's book collection would you like to see?
A piece about David Bowie's top 100 books, revealed as part of the David Bowie Is exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario, has led to a tip-off about another artist's reading list – this time a chronology of every book read by Art Garfunkel during the past 44 years.
The painstakingly detailed list charts what he read and exactly when – so we know that in the months leading up to the release of Bridge Over Troubled Water in January 1970, Garfunkel was reading Norman Mailer's Miami and the Siege of Chicago (in June 1969), Shakespeare's Hamlet (in July 1969), and a non-fiction account of the student uprising at Columbia University in 1968, The Strawberry Statement by James Simon Kunen, which he read in August 1969.
Garfunkel's list of favourites is strong on the classics, from the Brontë sisters, Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy to Virginia Woolf, George Eliot and DH Lawrence, as well as Russians – Vladimir Nabokov, Fyodor Dostoevsky – and Americans from Stephen King to John Updike and Jonathan Franzen. But he's not coy about the breadth of his reading: the most recent addition to his favourites, in June 2012, was Fifty Shade of Grey by EL James.
It got me wondering which other artists' bookshelves I'd love to have a good nose through: Prince? That would be a wild afternoon; I imagine sex, psychotherapy, a little fantasy and lots and lots of art. I'd be intrigued to know Tori Amos's favourites: alongside the American classics I see old European folktales and fables, a little politics and some select biographies, not of politicians or historical figures, but late-20th-century musicians and artists. And Nick Cave? Would he read horror? I think so. Mythology, certainly. And probably a few graphic novels.
Whose bookshelves would you be intrigued to hunt through, and what do you imagine you'd find there?
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