I've read a lot of books in my day and when I look ahead and calculate how many more I'll read in my lifetime I know the list is shortening up...I guess if I count all the books I read to my kids then the list is long. Art Garfunkel is an amazing reader and record keeper and his taste in books is broad, timeless and esoteric.I guess a songwriter needs good nutrition. Dylan also read all the classics in his self education and you can see the influence in his writing. Here's the last 10 books Art Garfunkel read as listed on this site which he uses to record all the books he reads.
| 1014. | 2007 | Reinhold Niebuhr | Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic | 1915-28 |
| 1015. | 2007 | John J. Jackson, Jr. | Harlemworld | 2001 |
| 1016. | 2007 | Edmund Burke | A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful |
1757 |
| 1017. | 2007 | Octavio Paz | The Labyrinth of Solitude | 1961 |
| 1018. | 2007 | V.S. Naipaul | A Bend in the River | 1979 |
| 1019. | 2007 | Linda Lawrence Hunt | Bold Spirit- Helga Estby's Forgotten Walk Across Victorian America |
2003 |
| 1020. | 2007 | Fyodor Dostoevsky | The Gambler | 1866 |
| 1021. | 2007 | Alexander Solzhenitsyn | Nobel Lecture | 1972 |
| 1022. | 2007 | Kenneth Seeskin | Maimonides: A Guide for Today's Perplexed | 1991 |
| 1023. | 2007 | Booth Tarkington | The Magnificent Ambersons | 1918 |
A lot of these books look like ones in my imagination or my next life I'd like to read. Some I could actually benefit from...like the notes about a Tamed Cynic...there should be a how-to book on that topic. And then others raise questions like how have our notions of the sublime and beautiful changed since 1757 when Edmund Burke addressed the topic?
I've been neglecting my blog lately because I've been living easy in this cool Seattle summer and also working on another writing project that I hope will get out of the gate and see the light of day sometime . Which reminds me, J.K Rowling gave the commencement address at Harvard and her speech was titled "The Fringe Benefits of Failure"....I'm not sure she was talking to the right crowd to appreciate her message since most kids who land at Harvard have yet to experience the comedown to the bumps and bruises of reality that happens to more later when they reach the "unprogrammed" curriculum of the working world. It's a good speech though and gives one some hope to pursue what's in your heart because that's what keeps life interesting, win or lose.
Enough said. Live free. Go jump in a lake and swim in the summer sun with no sunscreen. The more Vitamin D the better.
