What Dan read
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When I joined the Peace Corps in 1965-67 (Group Nepal VI), headquarters in Washington DC gave me two precious collections: 1. a box ("locker") of 250 books to read when I wasn't out trekking across the length and breadth of Bhojpur, the district in northeast Nepal where I was stationed by myself, 2. a medicine chest packed with over a hundred prescription drugs that kept me alive many a time. The books were carefully chosen, and I churned through them omniverously. I remember one in particular that had an enormous impact upon me, Glass Bead Game (Das Glasperlenspiel), by Hermann Hesse (1877-1962).
Two years before me, another Ohioan, Dan Pelzer, was posted to Dharan, a sub-metropolitan city in Sunsari District of Koshi Province. He was also gifted with a book chest by the Peace Corps, and that propelled his lifelong passion for reading. Dan, who passed away at the age of 92 in July 2025, kept a handwritten list of the 3,599 books that he had read since 1962. The list went viral on TikTok and garnered coverage from CBS, New York Times, NPR, People, TODAY and may other publications.
Dan's daughter, Marci, is writing a memoir about her dad and his book list. Here’s the website with her dad’s story, pictures, and book list.
From Dan’s original list
The first eight
1. The Blue Nile, Alan Moorehead
2. Babbitt, Sinclair Lewis
3. Rats, Lice, and History, Hans Zinsser
4. Dinosaurs, Nicholas Hotton III
5. The Wonder That Was India, A.L. Basham
6. A Short History of the Middle East, George E. Kirk
7. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
8, A Short History of India and Pakistan, T. Walter Wallbank
I printed out Dan's entire book list and it amounted to 215 pages (46,001 words) at 1.15 line spacing.
Selected reading
- "Skim reading, speed reading, and close, critical reading" (8/28/16)
- "Reading for pleasure at a young age" (6/23/15)
- "Writing by hand makes us think better" (5/30/26)
Tom said,
June 5, 2026 @ 6:15 pm
What does it mean to "read a book"? There are many books I have obtained and gone through because they have information I need for one purpose or another. I'm not sure I have read them all, properly. Occasionaly, one of these books will strike me as fascinating, and I read it closely. Usually, I skim for passages that pertain to my purpose. When I was backpacking around Asia, I used shared books at hostels as a way to deal with boredom at night. I don't remember most, but one caught my attention, transformed how I see the world, and has stuck with me. Certainly that book was read differently from most.
Seong of Baekje said,
June 5, 2026 @ 8:49 pm
IMO one is allowed to skim a section on cetology or what not, but if the skimming, and even worse skipping, goes much beyond that, you haven't really read the book.
Philip Taylor said,
June 6, 2026 @ 6:55 am
"IMO[,] one is allowed to skim a section on cetology or what not" — what, even if the book is specifically about whales ?!
Ed Rorie said,
June 6, 2026 @ 8:21 am
It’s not a book about whales.
Not a naive speaker said,
June 6, 2026 @ 8:34 am
Might it be Moby-Dick; or, The Whale?
Barbara Phillips Long said,
June 10, 2026 @ 4:28 pm
There are books I consult for information but have never read cover-to-cover and am not inclined to do so — bird guides, for instance, or cookbooks. I consider them reference books along with dictionaries, encyclopedias, and so on. But because I worked at rural newspapers for quite a few years, the Associated Press stylebook was both a reference and a book I read initially because I needed to be familiar with all of it. I have numerous books on my shelves that provide information, and in some cases, I have ended up — over time — reading an entire book I bought as a reference. I love having a personal library and my desire to own books was shaped by growing up in farming country far from libraries and bookstores where I could find answers to my questions.
But I also read light fiction and don't always want to be surprised by the ending. When I read mysteries, in particular, I may well read the first quarter of the book, then read the last three or four chapters, then the next-to-last four or five chapters, working my way backward in chunks until I have read the entire book out of sequence. If I can't bring myself to read the middle of the book, I count that as a DNF (did not finish). Other books I read out of sequence (occasionally skimming through passages of less interest to me) include multi-author books of essays, short story collections, and poetry anthologies,
Michael Vnuk said,
June 16, 2026 @ 1:11 am
Henry Morton Stanley, on one of his African journeys, took lots of books (approximately 180 pounds), although most were discarded for various reasons by the end. His comments and the full list can be found at
https://www.futilitycloset.com/2010/10/22/campfire-reading/
Scott Mauldin said,
June 17, 2026 @ 6:19 am
I was encouraged to read The Glass Bead Game by a friend shortly after my arrival for the first time in China. We worked together at a joint-venture university, and the book, being set in a "scholastic province" autonomous of the rest of the country, was, I soon understood, a warning about generalizing anything from my university experience to the rest of the country. [Spoiler ahead] at the end of the book, the main character leaves the scholastic province, and dies in his first day interacting in the "real world". I'll leave that unpacking of that metaphor to the reader.
In combination with his other popular work Siddhartha, Hesse was clearly extremely critical of the intelligentsia and skeptical of the possibility of learning anything from books that isn't better learned by getting one's hands dirty in the real world.
Olaf Zimmermann said,
June 19, 2026 @ 5:08 am
There's one thing which never ceases to amaze me:
A Tolstoy, across thousands of pages testing a reader's patience, berates people for not being the way they ought to be, thereby earning himself a Nobel Prize, whereas a Mark Twain, who describes people the way they actually are, thereby making them come alive on the page, seemingly did not merit the award. Adding insult to injury, Saul Bellow[s] also won the award!
I, for one, stick with Twain, Kafka, Orwell, Kästner, Malraux, Musil, Saint-Exupéry and Márquez (Lord knows why he got the award). Oh the humanity. (As for Hesse, he was a first-rate wordsmith, and an ace neurotic to boot, who regained popularity during the drug-addled 60s and 70s.)
Le monde est grand, mais la planète est petite.
HS said,
June 25, 2026 @ 12:55 am
A Tolstoy, across thousands of pages testing a reader's patience, berates people for not being the way they ought to be, thereby earning himself a Nobel Prize
But Tolstoy famously never won the Nobel Prize!!! (You write "a Tolstoy" and "a Mark Twain", so I suppose you are just using Tolstoy as an example of the sort of people who (in your opinion) write long, boring, moralistic books and do win the Nobel Prize, but you still ought to get your facts right.)
The Nobel Prizes began in 1901, and in the early years the Swedish Academy obviously had a large backlog of possible authors they could honour. Tolstoy and Mark Twain both died in 2010; if they had lived another 10 or 20 years it seems quite possible they could both have been awarded the prize. Another complication is that Alfred Nobel's will specified that the prize was for a work in "an ideal direction" ("i idealisk riktning" in Swedish) and there has been on-going debate about what that actually means (and even how to translate it into English – is it "an ideal direction" or "an idealistic direction"?) and the Swedish Academy has interpreted it in different ways at different times.
HS said,
June 25, 2026 @ 1:13 am
Oops, I meant Tolstoy and Twain both died in 1910, not 2010!!!
Olaf Zimmermann said,
June 25, 2026 @ 9:03 am
@HS should have read:
"thereby earning himself nominations for a Nobel Prize"
and was meant as such.
HS said,
June 27, 2026 @ 6:53 pm
should have read:
"thereby earning himself nominations for a Nobel Prize"
and was meant as such.
Of course…