This man read 3,599 books in his life. His hand-written reading list is inspiring others

CBC

3 days ago

Dan Pelzer's nose was always in a book.
The U.S. Marine Corps veteran and retired social worker made it his personal goal to read at least 100 pages every day, and he kept a list of every book he'd ever read since 1962, spanning almost any genre you can think of, totalling 3,599.
"That's how he passed the time — probably too much time," his daughter, Marci Pelzer, told As It Happens guest host Paul Hunter.
"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."
Dan Pelzer died on July 1 in Columbus, Ohio, at the age of 92, but his reading list is still sparking conversations. To honour his legacy, his family posted his entire list online at what-dan-read.com.
Marci says the list's reach has extended beyond her father's friends and family, and is inspiring others to read, think and talk about books.
"It means the world to us," she said.
Too long to print
Dan's family initially planned to hand out printed copies of the booklist at his funeral, but at more than 100 pages, it just wasn't feasible.
So, instead, they built a website, where people can flip through scanned copies of the yellowed pages, organised in chronological order by year, some hand-written, others typed.
Beginning with Alan Moorehead's The Blue Nile in 1962, and ending with Charles Dickens' David Copperfield in 2023, the list spans almost any genre or era of literature you can think of, from the literary cannon to pulpy page-turners. There's fiction and non-fiction, politics, biographies, and dense tomes on history and religion.
And almost all of them, Marci said, were library books.
To honour Dan's reading prowess, the Columbus Metropolitan Library has posted a 98-page PDF of the list in alphabetical order, as well as a searchable database of 2,091 of the titles and counting.
Compiling it all was no easy feat.
Members of the library's information and technology team scanned the physical pages and put it through a transcription software to digitize the text. But because of the quality of the scans, that only churned out about 500 titles.
After that, they manually compiled the list, adding subtitles, book covers and other useful information.
"He was definitely a Renaissance guy from the standpoint of the variety of titles," said Maria Armitage, the library's manager of enterprise systems and data analytics, who helped create the digitized collection.
"He read everything from, like, theologic theory to a lot of history, but then also popular fiction and had some pretty diverse tastes, overall."
The library's Whitehall Branch, a place Dan visited often, has also put up a physical display in his honour, called What Dan Read.
Marci says she's grateful for the library's work digitizing her father's collection.
"I think he'd love to see the library getting the attention, and he's so grateful to what public institutions like libraries have done for the community," Marci said.
Preferred John Grisham over James Joyce
While he read prolifically, Marci says her father definitely had his preferences.
"Sometimes he would talk about books being a slog. Other times he'd talk about loving them," she said.
The greatest slog, in Dan's opinion, was Ulysses, the famously hard-to-read modernist novel by Irish writer James Joyce.
He was a devout Catholic, and some of his favourite books were novels by Christian authors. He also loved to gobble up mysteries ands thrillers by bestselling authors.
"He loved a real page-turner," Marci said. "I'm sure if you flip through like I did, you saw John Grisham all through the years."
But he always finished any book he started. And if someone recommended a book to him, he would read it.
The second-last book on his list is Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, a 2022 coming-of-age novel by Gabrielle Zevin that Marci recommended.
"It made me happy to see that that was one of the last books he read," she said. "The ones that are special are the ones he read because I read them."
'A great comfort'
Marci says her father read to connect to people, and because he was a spiritual, deep-thinking and meditative person. It was also, she says, a source of solace in later years.
"I think it was a great comfort to him to go stay with my mom, who was in a nursing home the last three years, spend some time with her, and then go home to his empty apartment and read," she said.
Dan's wife of 52 years, Mary Lou Pelzer, died in 2024.
Marci says her dad didn't keep the list to brag or keep score.
"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."
Still, she believes he would be pleased at all the attention it's receiving.