A Man Read 3,599 Books Over 60 Years, and Now His Family Has Shared the Entire List Online

Dan Pelz­er died ear­li­er this year at the age of 92, leav­ing behind a hand­writ­ten list of all the books he’d read since 1962. His fam­i­ly had it dig­i­tized, put it online, and now it’s gone viral, some­what to the sur­prise of those of us who’d nev­er heard of him before. But that, it seems, is how the unpre­pos­sess­ing Pelz­er him­self would have want­ed it, accord­ing to the impres­sion giv­en by his grown chil­dren when inter­viewed about the pop­u­lar­i­ty of their father’s more than 100-page-long read­ing list. He began keep­ing it when he was sta­tioned in Nepal as a Peace Corps vol­un­teer, and kept it up until the end of his read­ing days in 2023, long after he retired from his job as a social work­er at an Ohio juve­nile cor­rec­tion­al facil­i­ty.

Exam­ined togeth­er, whether in the form of a com­plete scan or a search­able PDF, the 3,599 books, most of them checked out from the library, that Pelz­er record­ed hav­ing read con­sti­tute a per­son­al cul­tur­al his­to­ry of the past six decades. Described as a devout Catholic, he cer­tain­ly seems to have been con­sis­tent in his pur­suit of an inter­est in not just the his­to­ry of Chris­tian­i­ty in par­tic­u­lar, but the his­to­ry of west­ern civ­i­liza­tion in gen­er­al.

It comes as no sur­prise to see him dig into Will and Ariel Duran­t’s The Sto­ry of Civ­i­liza­tion series in the ear­ly nine­teen-eight­ies, slight­ly star­tling though it is that he read its eleven vol­umes in an appar­ent­ly ran­dom order. This habit turns out to be char­ac­ter­is­tic: though reput­ed to fin­ish every book he start­ed, he only got around to six vol­umes of Antho­ny Pow­ell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, start­ing with the eleventh and end­ing with the tenth.

Inter­spersed with the books of The Sto­ry of Civ­i­liza­tion are the likes of Philip Caputo’s A Rumor of War, John Irv­ing’s The World Accord­ing to Garp, and three nov­els by Ken Fol­lett. Though abid­ing­ly con­cerned with the sto­ry of mankind, Pelz­er appears also to have had a weak­ness for genre thrillers (he’s remem­bered as a big John Grisham fan) and top­i­cal books-of-the-moment. But whether read­ing at high‑, low‑, or mid­dle­brow lev­el, he seems to have been will­ing to give all major reli­gions and polit­i­cal philoso­phies, as well as some minor ones, a fair hear­ing — or rather, a fair read­ing. This makes for strik­ing jux­ta­po­si­tions in his list: Ayn Rand fol­lowed by L. Ron Hub­bard, Ta-Nehisi Coates by Jonathan Haidt. In that respect, he was, per­haps, the ide­al of the engaged, “demo­c­ra­t­ic” com­mon read­er one imag­ines pop­u­lat­ing Amer­i­ca while some­how nev­er encoun­ter­ing. If his list rais­es the ques­tion of why he did­n’t go into a more intel­lec­tu­al­ly ambi­tious line of work, it also, in a way, answers it: what time would that have left him to read?

Relat­ed con­tent:

Joseph Brodsky’s List of 83 Books You Should Read to Have an Intel­li­gent Con­ver­sa­tion

29 Lists of Rec­om­mend­ed Books Cre­at­ed by Well-Known Authors, Artists & Thinkers: Jorge Luis Borges, Pat­ti Smith, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, David Bowie & More

Oliv­er Sacks’ Rec­om­mend­ed Read­ing List of 46 Books: From Plants and Neu­ro­science, to Poet­ry and the Prose of Nabokov

Carl Sagan’s Ambi­tious Col­lege Read­ing List: Pla­to, Shake­speare, Gide, and Plen­ty of Phi­los­o­phy, Math & Physics (1954)

David Fos­ter Wallace’s Sur­pris­ing List of His 10 Favorite Books, from C. S. Lewis to Tom Clan­cy

100 Books to Read in a Life­time

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.