From Ulysses to Grisham, Dan Pelzer’s 109-page book log proves a life well-read is a life well-lived. How will you track your reads?
This story feels like it’s straight out of a Hallmark movie or a cozy novel. Dan Pelzer, a 92-year-old, recently passed away, and instead of the typical obituary, he left behind something unique, brilliant, and quite extraordinary: a whopping 109-page handwritten list of every single book he had read from 1962 up until his death. Yes, you read that right, 109 pages.
A Literary Love Affair
The magic started back in 1962, when Dan was serving in the Peace Corps in Nepal. He stumbled upon a small library, around 150 paperbacks, and that’s when the spark ignited. From that moment, he began meticulously documenting each and every book he finished. Over six decades, he read more than 3,000 books!
A World Beyond Just the Classics
Dan was a well-read man. He tackled the classics, sure, but he was also delightfully unpretentious in his reading choices. He once said that reading James Joyce’s Ulysses was “pure torture” (which… isn’t entirely wrong… that book is a slog), much preferring something like a John Grisham thriller.
The list is hugely varied, with the first book being The Blue Nile by Alan Moorehead, followed by Babbitt, Moby Dick, and then Rats, Lice and History by Hans Zinsser… Dan had been many things throughout his 92-year-old life, but a picky reader was clearly not one of them.
A Library That Was Home
A lot of Dan’s books came from the Columbus Metropolitan Library in Ohio. His daughter, Marci, even spoke about how important the library was to Dan in interviews after his passing. “Nobody loved the library more than Dan,” she said.
They’d go every Saturday when she and her brother were kids. He signed them up for reading programs, and he frequented different branches, downtown, Livingston, and Whitehall, for years. She even went as far as to say that he was probably among the library’s highest circulation statistics and one of their longest-term borrowers.
A Lasting Literary Legacy
Dan’s family did consider passing out his list of books conquered at his funeral, but since the document was 109 pages long, it seemed like an impossible feat. Instead, they decided to scan the handwritten list onto a PC and upload it to a website.
Now, at What-Dan-Read.com, people from all over the world, those who knew Dan and didn’t, can see what he read over the last 60 years of his life. His literary legacy is free for all to see, to browse, and to take inspiration from… a lovely virtual time capsule of reading adventures.
The family also went one step further. Since the news of Dan’s record-keeping hit the headlines, they’ve requested that anyone who feels the need or inspiration to send them a gesture in their time of grief donate to the Kinship Community Food Center. If not, they’ve suggested people simply pick up a book. Choose a real page turner, and get invested, just like their beloved Dan had for the last 60 years.
How to Track Your Own Reading (Without Needing 109 Pages of Paper)
While Dan’s handwritten list is charming and delightfully old-school, it isn’t the most practical. If you read when you’re out and about, you don’t want to have to carry 109 pages of records with you just in case you finish your book. But that doesn’t mean you can’t start logging your reading in a different way. Today, we’ve got far more tools to note down our literary adventures with.
One of the most popular ways to keep track of your reading habits is through Goodreads. Think of Goodreads as Facebook for bookworms. You can rate books, leave reviews, join reading challenges, and peek at what your friends are reading. It’s owned by Amazon, so it’s huge, meaning almost any book you’ve read is already in the database. It’s great for setting annual goals (like “50 books in 2025”) and seeing your progress in a satisfying little bar chart, if that’s what you’re into.
Alternatively, you’ve got other apps and sites, like Storygraph. Storygraph is more like a quiet indie café with artisan vibes. It gives you mood charts for your reading (apparently, I read a suspicious amount of “reflective and emotional” books) and helps you find recommendations based on the vibes you actually enjoy.
It’s clean, ad-free, and perfect if you want stats without the social clutter. Then there are websites like Tome, which are slightly newer to the block, but just as fun. Tome is like a Moleskine notebook. It’s sleek, customizable, simple, pretty, and creative. Think Tumblr, but for books and bookish content only.
If you don’t want to do it digitally, you can of course still keep your record by hand. To save the carrying-around-109-pages thing, why not use a notebook? Then, when your notebook is full, you simply store it and get another. You could even digitize the notebooks eventually, if you’re after a kind of hybrid approach to things!
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Millie Ramm
Millie has been writing since she was a child, and has spent more time with her nose in books than anywhere else. She has been ghostwriting novels and editing for the past few years, and when not working she is curled up with her cats, looking for her next read.
