Art Garfunkel is a compulsive reader, says Nick Paumgarten in The New Yorker. Since June 1968, Garfunkel has read a grand total of 1,023 of the greatest works of literature. He knows this because he has compulsively been keeping track—chronologically listing each title, first on sheets of loose-leaf paper and then, beginning several years ago, on his Web site. Averaging more than two books a month over the past 40 years, Garfunkel has tackled an eclectic cross section of novels, poetry, and philosophy, from War and Peace and The Brothers Karamazov to The Great Gatsby and The Picture of Dorian Gray. “I read for the reading pleasure, not the gold star,” he said. “Reading is a way to take downtime and make it stimulating. If you’re in the waiting room of the dentist’s office and don’t want to twiddle your thumbs, you turn to Tolstoy.” Whether reading Milton, Heidegger, or Roth, he follows a precise routine—marking the passages he finds exceptional with vertical lines, putting arrows next to places he’d like to visit, and drawing little circles next to any word he needs to look up. “I’m anal compulsive,” he said, noting that he once read the Random House Dictionary, back to front. Garfunkel does have his standards. “I avoid fluff. The stuff that men are always reading on planes: I don’t read that.”
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