What it means to read for a lifetime
Dan Pelzer read 3,599 books in his life, and this is what I learned reading about his journey
Sometimes, when you’re scrolling on the internet, you’ll come across something that suddenly makes the digital grip on reality all worth it.
For me, that was when the story of Dan Pelzer came up on my feed.
Ohio resident Dan Pelzer died last month at 92-years-old. In his lifetime, he read at least 3,599 books. That’s about 40 books a year from the day he was born, so I think it is safe to assume that at some point, his reading accelerated.
On what-dan-read.com, put together by his children, you can peruse each of his many, many, many titles, nearly all of which he borrowed from his local Ohio library.
Go Tell It On The Mountain. The Sun Also Rises. The Age of Innocence. The Aeneid.
Mr. Pelzer engaged deeply with the classics, yet remained grounded in his perspective (he described James Joyce’s Ulysses as “Pure torture,” which, real).
His diligence in reading the kind of books many of us avoid after graduating university appears to be part of the core of who Mr. Pelzer was; someone who sought to educate himself for a lifetime.
I first learned this lesson from my own grandfather. A General Motors factory foreman and a Vietnam veteran, my grandfather was never again able to pursue education after seventeen. Yet through his whole life, he was a voracious reader—mostly history books as thick as a forearm on both American and world history, but above all, he liked presidents (Teddy Roosevelt was his favorite).