And you thought YOUR Books-Read List was impressive?

Check out this guy's.

For most of the past 40 years, Art Garfunkel has been compiling, first in looseleaf and now Internet form, a running tally of all the books he's read. He broke the 1,000 barrier last year with a re-read of his first book on the list, Rousseau's The Confessions (not to be confused with Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, which came in at 995), and his voraciousness has worked out to a bit more than two books a month for forty years straight. He's also been a bit busier than I have for most of that time, making the accomplishment all that more impressive.

Word of this came, as word of most highbrow things around here tends to come, through this week's New Yorker. While he has his occasional pulpy moment with Dan Brown and even Paul's ex-wife Carrie Fisher, there's little if any true fluff in the choices mentioned in the magazine piece or among the recent of his reads in my brief website-sampling.

Much of it, in fact, reminds me of books on reading lists from college that I may, or in many cases may not have, actually read despite writing papers and taking tests on them. Many of the ones I did read, though, I got to long before Artie did, including his last websited piece, Beckett's Waiting for Godot.

If you want to peruse his favorites from over the life of the effort, that list is here. Many of them are (pardon the S&G reference) Old Friends of mine as well; others damn well should have been, and I may use his list as a reference point for catching up on some I either blew off completely or just don't remember that well.

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Those busy days I'd promised? Delivered. All day yesterday and much of today spent out of the office, and Em and I will be out of town from tomorrow afternoon into Friday, winding up at my sister's, ultimately. I could use a curl-up with a good book right about now.