#dan pelzer

He Read (at Least) 3,599 Books in His Lifetime. Now Anyone Can See His List.

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.

This book is not for everyone, but it found me right when I needed it.

As an economist, one of the first principles I learnt was the “Time Value of Money”. DO NOT underestimate the power of compounding interest. 

In 2014, Ronald Read, a janitor and lifelong investor, passed away with a staggering $8M net worth. No lottery wins. No secret inheritance. Just living below his means, investing consistently, and letting time do the rest - for over 40 years. 

In 2025, Dan Pelzer gained NYT coverage for having read at least 3,599 books throughout his life. 

At first glance, these impressive statistics seem like extraordinary anomalies. But these people's lives prove otherwise. 

Time is the most powerful force in the world. 

Make time your friend, and improving by 1% every day compounds to 37x growth in a year. Make time your enemy, and deteriorating by 1% every day leaves you with just 2.5% of where you started.

The British cycling team, once unremarkable, took this idea seriously. From 2007 to 2017, they improved every single detail, from bike seat ergonomics to athlete sleep quality, by just 1% and dominated with 178 world championships, 66 Olympic/Paralympic gold medals, and 5 Tour de France victories.

This applies even in the art world, where genius is traditionally exalted above all.

In a photography class at University of Florida, students were randomly split into two groups:

Quality: graded on producing a single perfect photo

Quantity: graded on the number of photos they took

Ironically, the quantity group ended up producing the best-quality photos.

As a writer and as a human, I often battle imposter syndrome and agonize over when (if ever!) my post will go viral.

As a twenty-something young adult, I don’t know exactly where my life is going amidst the chaos in the world.

Dan Pelzer, who died on July 1 at age 92, is having a viral moment after his relatives shared his 109-page log featuring every single book he finished over more than 60 years

— Ella Feldman - Daily Correspondent | July 31, 2025

When Dan Pelzer died on July 1, he had logged 3,599 books that he’d completed between 1962 and 2023. Columbus Metropolitan Library

There was no Goodreads in 1962, the year Dan Pelzer spent making his way through the library of paperbacks set aside for Peace Corps volunteers in Nepal. He started keeping track of everything he read using a pen and paper.

By the time Pelzer died on July 1 at age 92, he had logged 3,599 books that he’d read between 1962 and 2023, the year his eyesight deteriorated, as the New York Times’ Aishvarya Kavi reports. Now, those reading logs are available to the public on what-dan-read.com, a website created by Pelzer’s daughter with the help of her godson.

The website was initially created for Pelzer’s funeral, available to guests through a QR code on the back of the 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,” his daughter, Marci Pelzer, tells the Times.

Then, she shared the list on LinkedIn, calling it her family’s “most precious inheritance,” and it started to gain visibility. But it wasn’t until the Columbus Metropolitan Library decided to share Pelzer’s story on its Facebook page on July 21 that What Dan Read started going viral, Marci Pelzer tells Stacia Naquin of WBNS-TV, a station in Columbus, Ohio.

“I just keep thinking about how crazy it is that we’ve spread the list to so many people,” she adds.

Columbus Metropolitan Library, July 21, 2025. "My dad, Dan Pelzer, died July 1 at the age of 92, leaving me the list of the thousands of books he read since 1962. ALL of his books were Columbus Metropolitan Library books. Nobody loved the library more than Dan. When we were little, he took us to the downtown library every Saturday morning and enrolled us in every summer reading program. He was a regular at the Livingston and then Whitehall branches until he could no longer read. I'm sure he would be among your highest circulation and longest term borrowers. We thought about printing the list to distribute at his funeral, but it was too long. In his obituary, we suggested that people read 'a real page turner' in lieu of flowers." Dan Pelzer spent a lifetime in the library. His daughter shared this message with us, and archived his reading legacy online.

Marci Pelzer’s note to the Columbus Metropolitan Library about her father’s list detailed how he would take his children to the library every Saturday morning. “Nobody loved the library more than Dan,” she wrote. “I’m sure he would be among your highest-circulation and longest-term borrowers.” She also disclosed that, in her father’s obituary, her family asked people to read “a real page turner” in his honor in lieu of flowers.

At Pelzer’s most frequented branch in his lifetime, the library has set up a display featuring a sample of the thousands of books he read, from Capital in the Twenty-First Century, economist Thomas Piketty’s examination of wealth and income inequality, to novels like Garth Stein’s The Art of Racing in the Rain.

Pelzer’s list doesn’t include the books he read prior to 1962. It also doesn’t include the Bible, which Pelzer read about a dozen times, as his son John Pelzer tells the Times. But it does shed light on who the Columbus man was.

In the 1980s, Pelzer’s lists featured several books about the mental health of teenagers, which were likely connected to his job as a social worker at a juvenile correctional facility, his daughter tells the Times. His son adds that he was a lifelong liberal and read a number of books about politics. Pelzer’s lists also feature books about religion and memoirs, such as Jennette McCurdy’s 2022 book I’m Glad My Mom Died.

“We know he was sometimes reading at work,” Marci Pelzer explains to Paul Hunter of CBC Radio’s “As It Happens.” “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."

The last book on Pelzer’s list was a classic: Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield. But the avid reader kept up with contemporary fiction, too. His penultimate book was Gabrielle Zevin’s 2022 Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, a novel about a pair of video game designers.

This isn’t the first time Pelzer’s reading logs have earned him media attention, according to What Dan Read. The website features a copy of a 2006 article by the Columbus Dispatch’s Mike Harden, which details how Pelzer was making his way through roughly 80 books a year. He had recently read James Joyce’s Ulysses, and he wasn’t afraid to tell the journalist what he really thought. “The worst,” he said. “Pure torture.”

Photo by cottonbro studio on Pexels.com The Weekly Wrap: July 27-August 2 Reading Logs The story began with a post from the Columbus Metropolitan Library about one of their patrons who recently passed. What was extraordinary about Dan Pelzer was that he kept a hand-written log of all the books he read between 1962 and 2023, 3599 in all! His family created a website reproducing the log. The…