What Dan Read
We’d like to celebrate the life of fellow bookworm, Dan Pelzer, who left this world, at the age of 92 on July 1, 2025, both a gift and legacy in the form of a reading list containing 3,599 titles. Dan, a Marine Korean War veteran, social worker by day and security guard by night, was an avid reader who lived his life with the goal to read 100 pages daily. He began keeping his reading list in 1962 while he was stationed in Nepal with the Peace Corps. His surviving family wished to share printed copies with funeral attendees, but because his list would have been over 100 pages long, his family created a website in his honor instead, sharing his handwritten list with the entire world.
You can look at Dan’s handwritten reading list here.
Dan’s list begins with The Blue Nile by Alan Moorehead and ends on December 30, 2023 with Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield. Despite his affinity for mystery novels, Dan’s list is extremely diverse, spanning almost every known genre. It vacillates between biographies, dystopias, world histories, classic fiction, theological theory, coming-of-age stories, and of course, The Lord of the Rings. Most incredibly, almost all of them were library books. The Columbus Metropolitan Library (Ohio), where Dan was a patron, now has both a physical display and online section dedicated to him, and thankfully has transposed his list into a pdf and a searchable excel sheet that you can view here.
Most of the books Dan read only once, although there are a few exceptions such as The Great Gatsby. Never daunted, he read both Proust’s In Search of Lost Time and James Joyce’s Ulysses, declaring the latter “pure torture”. His list makes a fascinating study of the trends of a person’s attention and interests in what they choose to read when, over the course of a lifetime.
We encourage you to check out his list and see which of your favorite books are on it. Several writers we discuss on our tour made the list, including Sinclair Lewis and Jack Kerouac. We invite you to celebrate Dan’s life by choosing one (or more) of the books from his list to add to yours. It is never too late to begin logging your reading; perhaps now is the time to start.
“My meaning simply is, that whatever I have tried to do in life, I have tried with all my heart to do well; that whatever I have devoted myself to, I have devoted myself to completely; that in great aims and in small, I have always been thoroughly in earnest.”
Charles Dickens, David Copperfield