He did not enjoy the nearly 1,000-page “Ulysses” by James Joyce, nor L. Ron Hubbard’s “Mission Earth,” a 10-volume science fiction series published in the 1980s. But once Dan Pelzer set his mind on reading something, he did not put it down until he was finished.
That’s how Mr. Pelzer’s children said he was able to read 3,599 books from 1962, when he first began jotting his reads down on his language class work sheets while stationed in Nepal with the Peace Corps, to 2023, when his eyesight failed him and he could no longer read.
Mr. Pelzer died at 92 on July 1 in Columbus, Ohio, where he had lived for five decades. At the funeral, his daughter, Marci Pelzer, wanted to hand out his reading list to friends and family. But at more than 100 pages, it was not practical to print physical copies. So Ms. Pelzer, 52, had her godson create a website, what-dan-read.com, which guests could access through a QR code on the back of the funeral program.
“I just thought it’d be so cool to give people who cared, who he cared about — to send them away from the funeral with the list,” Ms. Pelzer said.
via Marci Pelzer
Mr. Pelzer’s reading choices were varied. In the 1980s, he read several books on the mental health of adolescents, which Ms. Pelzer said probably served as resources for his job as a social worker at a juvenile correctional facility in Ohio.
On the list for 1999: Classics, bildungsromans and autofiction.
John Grisham, the prolific author of courtroom dramas, might have been his most-read author, Ms. Pelzer said.
And, as his eyesight began to fail him in 2023, Charles Dickens’s “David Copperfield” was the last book he ever read.
“I remember the conversations that we had about books that we both loved,” said Ms. Pelzer. “He loved reading about religion. He loved memoirs. He loved novels.”