The Insufferable Art Garfunkel

I was reading a little article in the New Yorker about Art Garfunkel and how he has posted on his website a list of every book he’s read since 1968. It totals some crazy number like 1023 books, and the vast majority are books that “normal” folks like you and me will probably never read – tomes by Proust and Kant and Spinoza and probably works by Homer, Socrates and Plato in the original Greek. Every now and then he throws a bone to the layman (he read The DaVinci Code, for example), just so he appears to be down-to-earth. This was all very fascinating, I love to read about what other people read, and sometimes it spurs me on to try something new in my own literary world. But then he has a quote, “I avoid fluff.” He continues, “The stuff that men are always reading on planes: I don’t read that,” and he goes on to disparage the whole subgenre of postmodern fiction, just because he didn’t care for Gravity’s Rainbow (he found it “fraudulent”.)

Screw you, Art Garfunkel. No wonder Paul Simon went solo.

Literature snobs like Garfunkel just really get under my skin. I don’t give two whits if some guy wants to while away his leisure time reading Chaucer and Milton and Dante, in fact, I admire it. I’ve read quite a few classics out of a sense of duty, feeling that I wouldn’t be a rounded human being without them. I count Moby-Dick and Crime and Punishment among my favorite books of all time, and I’m a long time subscriber to the New Yorker, which screams “pretentious,” at least in my circles. But to put down a bunch of people because they may enjoy John Grisham or W.E.B. Griffin, Nicholas Sparks or Jan Karon, man, that stuff just really ticks me off. “I’m too good for that drivel,” is what Garfunkel seems to be saying, thumbing his nose at about 96.75% of the literature out there today.

One of my favorite authors and new literary hero (and someone Garfunkel wouldn’t deign to have in his library), Nick Hornby delivers a few zingers aimed at “literati” like Garfunkel in the preface to his book Housekeeping vs. The Dirt. This book, which is a collection of columns he wrote for some magazine that no one’s ever heard of, is a fascinating read. In his columns, he lists books he’s read in a particular month, and then gives a few comments about them. His earlier collection of columns, The Polysyllabic Spree, inspired me to try to find a few of the titles he spoke fondly of, and I’m sure that once I’m finished with this latest one, I will feel the same way.

Anyway, the preface to Housekeeping is the best part so far, with Hornby sticking up for everyone who has read something like The Notebook and liked it, while taking aim at “clever-dick” critics like Garfunkel. Hell, I’ll say it: I enjoyed Good in Bed by Jennifer Weiner. Yep, gotta love chick-lit.

Nick Hornby also has some valuable advice in this preface. Something that I wish I had read about 30 years ago. Namely, if you start reading something and you don’t care for it, if you can’t make it through a page without falling asleep, then READ SOMETHING ELSE THAT YOU’LL ENJOY. I can’t begin to tell you how long it took me to slog through One Hundred Years of Solitude. I guess I’m glad I read it, but I could have read a dozen other books that I might have enjoyed during that time. About two years ago, I got the book Riven Rock by T.C. Boyle. Now, T.C. Boyle is one of my very favorite authors ever, but there was something about this book that made it feel like I was reading it underwater. I didn’t enjoy it, the book felt like lead in my hands. But I felt guilty that I wasn’t reading it and liking it, so I read NOTHING rather than that doorstop. Finally, I got the guts to abandon it and move on, and now I’m currently reading like a madman (I’d forgotten how much I enjoy it!)

But, take a look at those books that I’ve recently read. Are they substantial enough? Do you think Art Garfunkel would approve?