The King of Reading.(The Talk of the Town)(Art Garfunkel)

Candidates for political office, and the reporters who cover them, like to believe that a reading list reveals a great deal. In recent years, the cherished-book list has become as compulsory a component of the Presidential campaign as a church affiliation or a health-care plan. Hillary Clinton named "Little Women" and "The Poisonwood Bible." Mike Huckabee: the Bible and "Mere Christianity." Barack Obama: "Song of Solomon" and "Moby-Dick." John McCain: "For Whom the Bell Tolls." When mishandled, the book thing can lead to grief, as when Mitt Romney cited "Battlefield Earth," by L. Ron Hubbard, or when John Edwards, four years ago, went with I. F. Stone's "The Trial of Socrates," which earned him the skunk eye from Robert Novak. ("Did [Edwards] know of evidence that Stone received secret payments from the Kremlin?")

Then there is Art Garfunkel, who is not running for President but who has nonetheless provided the world with a list: the Garfunkel Library, a chronological index of the thousand and twenty-three books that he has read since June, 1968. He has been recording their particulars neatly on sheets of loose-leaf paper--forty or so titles to a page--for nearly forty years. About a decade ago, he posted the list on his Web site (which he pays a fan in Levittown to maintain). It begins with Rousseau's "Confessions" and ends with Booth Tarkington's "The Magnificent Ambersons," which he finished before Christmas. In between, the list ticks off, at a rate of 2.16 books a month, a dazzling syllabus that's a testament to steroidal self-improvement, as well as to the magical time-furnishing powers of royalty checks. Foucault, Balzac, Chesterton, Heidegger, Spinoza, Hazlitt, Milton, Proust: he has slayed them all, and let us know. Against the temptation to sneer at such ostentation, one may pit an appreciation that a celebrity has so resolutely done his homework, and taken such delight in it. In the winter and spring of 1969, much of which was spent on the set of the film "Catch-22," where the reading habit really took hold, he got through "The Picture of Dorian Gray," "Catch-22," "Candide," "The Great Gatsby," "War and Peace," "Portnoy's Complaint," "Down and Out in Paris and London," and "The Brothers Karamazov." In September of 1981, the month of his reunion concert with Paul Simon in Central Park, he nailed "Nicholas Nickleby," and then, in the following months, moved on to Jack London, Henry James, Aristotle, St. Augustine, Rabelais, and Kant, among others. December, 1982: the Book of Job, "The Search for Alexander," "Stephen Hero," ...