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After Dan Pelzer died this month at 92, his children uploaded the handwritten reading list to what-dan-read.com, hoping to inspire readers everywhere.
July 26, 2025, 5:01 a.m. ET
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.
“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.”
