A deceased man’s goliath list of every book he ever read is inspiring readers young and old alike after it was turned into a popular website.
Passing away at the age of 92 on July 1st of this year, former Marine and social worker Dan Pelzer had for years committed himself to reading 100 pages every day.
When his own story had finally gone cover to cover, he had read 3,599 books of every imaginable genre, every one of which was written down in a list he kept since 1962.
That year, he began his list with Alan Moorehead’s The Blue Nile in 1962, and ending it over 40 years later with Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, in 2023. At over 100 pages, the idea to give out a copy of his reading list to observers at his funeral “wasn’t feasible,” his descendants say.
Instead, they created what-dan-read.com, where people can scroll through a digitized version of the list, find some good titles to pick next, and receive an incredible glimpse into the life of an incredible reader.
“I’ve never met anyone as curious as him,” said Marci Pelzer, Dan’s daughter. “We know he was sometimes reading at work. But he also read on the bus and everywhere he went. He always had a book open, a book in his hand. And it stimulated great conversations with all kinds of people,” she told CBC.
By 2006 he had finished 3,000 books. Flipping through the first few pages, it strikes one how much of an interest in history he had, but the great science fiction books of modern times stick out, as do pulp fictions, mysteries, and just about everything else.
The Columbus Ohio Metropolitan Library has a similar memorial project for Dan, whereby they created a special archive exclusively of texts he read. They digitized the list, used transcription software to generate about 500 titles, and manually added the rest into a PDF. They also created a searchable database complete with images of the book covers, where library goers can look up what Dan read that’s currently available to check out.
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The library’s Whitehall Branch, a place Dan visited often, has also put up a physical display in his honor, called What Dan Read, with a diverse selection on stands.
Part of Dan’s personal reading rules was that a book once opened had to be finished, and Marci remembers he noted Ulysses by James Joyce as being the worst “slog” of all.
His wife later lived in a nursing home, which gave him copious hours alone during the morning and evenings to read. The second last book he ever read was one Marci recommended to him.
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“It was just a list of the books he read that he kept personally so he could remember and think about them,” she said. “It wasn’t for anybody else, and most people didn’t know he had it.”
She called him a spiritual, meditative, and introspective person, interested in all kinds of dialogue with the aim of creating greater tolerance for each other.
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