There’s something special about reading for pleasure. It’s not just about learning, but about nurturing our mental health, building empathy and keeping our creativity alive.
As an avid reader myself, it surprised me to learn that daily pleasure reading has dropped 40% over the past two decades, according to a recent study in the journal iScience. The research tracked Americans’ reading habits from 2003 to 2023, showing a steady decline of about 3% each year.
But while those numbers might paint a concerning picture, there are still people who remind us how transformative a lifelong love of reading can be.
Dan Pelzer was one of those people. In 1962, without Goodreads to track his progress, the young Peace Corps volunteer in Nepal began keeping a handwritten log of every book he read. What started as a simple list became a remarkable six decades’ journey through 3,599 books, ending only when his eyesight failed in 2023, two years before his death in July at age 92.
In honor of her father, his daughter, Marci, created a website, what-dan-read.com, to share his complete reading list. The website has since gone viral, capturing hearts worldwide after the Columbus Metropolitan Library shared his story on Facebook.
The library also created a special archive exclusively of texts he read. They digitized the list, used transcription software to generate about 500 titles and manually added the rest into a PDF. They also created a searchable database complete with images of the book covers, where library visitors can look up what Dan read that’s available to check out.
Dan’s reading habits painted an intimate portrait of his life. In the 1980s, his list featured books about teenage mental health, reflecting his work as a social worker at a juvenile correction facility. His son notes that political books revealed his lifelong liberal leanings, while religious texts and memoirs showed his spiritual curiosity.
Books sparked conversations wherever he went, and his eclectic tastes spanned from philosophically themed books to Garth Stein’s “The Art of Racing in the Rain.”
His final literary companion? Charles Dickens’ “David Copperfield,” though he’d kept current with contemporary fiction right until the end – his penultimate read was Gabrielle Zevin’s 2022 novel “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow.”
Dan’s story reminds us that reading isn’t just about the books themselves, but about the life they help us live. In his family’s obituary request, they asked people to read “a real page turner” in his honor instead of sending flowers – a perfect tribute to a man whose curiosity never dimmed.
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