A Life Lived in Books

In Memoriam: Dan Pelzer, 1933–2025

Dan Pelzer started recording every book he read in 1962, when he arrived in Dharan, Nepal, as a Peace Corps Volunteer, and began a ritual of reading through the paperbacks in his Peace Corps book locker by the bright light of a Petromax kerosene pump lantern. 

Thus a lifelong passion for literature was sparked, which, with the help of Dan’s daughter Marci, has gone on to inspire untold numbers of people since his death in 2025 at the age of 92. After he passed away on July 1, Marci posted her father’s meticulously handwritten record of the 3,599 books he had read over the previous 62 years online. The response was immediate.  

The list, now found on a website called What Dan Read, was celebrated in The New York Times and Smithsonian magazine, as well as on CBS News, NPR, People.com, and TODAY.com. Dan’s own local library, the Columbus Metropolitan Library, digitized, cataloged, analyzed, and memorialized the collection, allowing its patrons to follow in his well-read footsteps.  

In Nepal, Dan lived in a three-room house in the foothills of the Himalayas with two other Volunteers, Burt Lazarus and Victor Tomseth. The three brought with them a single Peace Corps book locker—one of the black cardboard boxes that each contained around 150 paperbacks, compliments of Sargent Shriver, the first director of Peace Corps. When Tomseth learned that a nearby Volunteer would not be replaced, “a couple of us went over and liberated a second book locker,” he said. 

Dan started writing his list on the back of his Nepali language worksheets: “Books in Nepal (1): The Blue Nile, Moorehead, Alan. Babbitt, Lewis, Sinclair. Rats, Lice and History, Zinsser, Hans…” 

When he returned to Detroit after his Peace Corps service, Dan went to his public library to finish C.S. Forester’s Admiral Hornblower in the West Indies, the last book on his Nepal list. No longer limited to the contents of the Peace Corps book lockers, Dan’s reading grew in new directions, with titles such as Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton, Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott, and History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides. The next year he read Sir Winston Churchill’s six-volume history of the Second World War. 

Eventually he moved to Columbus, Ohio, married Mary Lou Hannon, and began a 31-year career as a social worker at a maximum-security detention center for juveniles run by the Ohio Department of Youth Services. When Marci was born, Dan was reading Royal Flash by George MacDonald Fraser. Son John arrived as he worked through Woodward and Bernstein’s All the President’s Men. 

By 2015 he had read 2,437 books, with highlights including Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (volumes 1 and 2), Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy, Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror, and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s just-published Between the World and Me. 

If anything, his reading habit became even more eclectic in his later years, with 2021 entries for Rememberings by Sinead O’Connor and Peril by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa. Dan’s list ends on December 30, 2023, with the Charles Dickens classic David Copperfield as the final entry.  

“He was a quiet man full of curiosity,” said Marci. “What he wanted was a good steady gig. He didn’t need promotions. He was about his books, his friends, and his family.”