From "He Read (at Least) 3,599 Books in His Lifetime. Now Anyone Can See His List. After Dan Pelzer died this month at 92, his children uploaded the handwritten reading list to what-dan-read.com, hoping to inspire readers everywhere" (NYT).
What do you need to do to get The New York Times to write an article about all the books your father read? You have to put together a website as cool as "What Dan Read."
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39 comments:
Great site. He has the books listed by year, I can see that in one year he's going down the list of "Modern librarys best 100 novels of the 20th century".
Here is Art Garfunkel’s list:
https://www.artgarfunkel.com/en/_files/ugd/dc8261_b75e7578baa64db8acff26b1d2197ec5.pdf?index=true
The list on the what-dan-read.com website is a bit hard to read as it's handwritten and scanned in (Tip For The Family: get some Filipino on Upwork to type it all up....$15-20 at the max). That said, the guy had wide-ranging interests. I do hope that in the age of 30 second TikTok clips, there remains a cadre of those who immerse themselves in the written word. Perhaps if the electrical grid collapses, society unwinds, and we revert to some primitive lifestyle, those who read will arise as the Philosopher Kings of the next civilization.
Color me unimpressed. Somewhere out there is a website where someone has posted a photograph of every turd they've extruded for the last twenty years. Bonus points if there're captions giving the backstory.
Piker
I've probably averaged 2 books a week since I was 12. Call it 100/yr. About 25% reread so call it 5,000 1st time books.
Can I get a cookie?
John Henry
I would say that once you have read enough books you need to get out of the basement and engage in some useful intellectual activity. It’s better to be a lifelong college student, at least you have feedback and challenges other than the voice in your mind.
A young person is a sponge, an adult participates in society. Not saying that the people here have been wrong, but Henry Ford said “men satisfy their minds more by finding out things for themselves than by heaping together the things which somebody else has found out”. What Ford seems to have missed is that you should know a good part of that heap. The definition of a scholar is someone who knows everything written about a narrow subject.
The plaintive comment of someone who reads almost every day but likes getting dirty in the world more.
Borges would have loved it.
I kept a list one year when I was in my first bout of history grad school about 1980. It was about fifty books, not counting the class readings. I've looked for it since, but it has vanished.
I recently got two books out of the MPL, one by Alan Furth and one by the late Philip Kerr--and when I got home realized I had read them already. I did not reread them.
I was in Pelzer SC yesterday which apparently is 15 minutes from Anthony Cumia’s house. I paid $2.54 for a gallon of gas. So that’s cool.
What do you need to do to get The New York Times to write an article about all the books your father read?
Read a list of books that support the democrat party and their mission to install a one party state with GOPe allies in service to globalist oligarchs.
For the NYTs Catholicism is ok to mention.
The Bible is not.
Extrapolate.
Fun list. In a world where there's so much negative it seems a lot of people are just conditioned to always be negative. I'm a lifelong reader but never documented what I've read. This list is not unique in achievement but in documentation and representative of a thoughtful hobby. It makes me think about the books Ive read. And the memories they bring, not just of the book itself but the time and setting of my life, and like an aroma can do then other memories of that time open up again.
They have been friends over the years and I love that both my kids, now 11 and 13, have this shared love, not in absence of other parts of life but as a contributing addition, honestly getting me back to reading more fiction again.
Thanks for posting this Althouse.
Thanks for highlighting this story, Professor. I’ve been keeping a list like this for 20+ years. Looks like I need to send a link about Dan’s website to my daughters…
I tried to read each new Hardy Boys book in an hour. Usually I made it. When I find an author I like, I tend to read all their output. Earle Stanley Gardner, Ellery Queen, James Lee Burke, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Herman Melville, Mark Twain.....
You also have to exclude the Bible.
"I would say that once you have read enough books you need to get out of the basement and engage in some useful intellectual activity. It’s better to be a lifelong college student, at least you have feedback and challenges other than the voice in your mind."
Not sure what to make of this. Reading the book is the intellectual activity! Most people analyze the book as they read it. Agreeing or disagreeing. I don't "Input" from other people and if I do, I can go on the internet.
I must say that the quality of "feedback" you'll get on college campus if you read say "War and Peace" or "For Whom the Bell Tolls" will be very low. Assuming you can find someone who read them.
Reading the bible is overrated. I'd say other than the Psalms and the 10 commandments, most of the Old Testemant is worthless.
I started a list like that back in 2009, 669 books read to date. It's just a list of titles and authors, no commentary, I had a companion list of books I had reread (I had moved hundreds of books into and out of close to a dozen places on the theory I might want to read them again sometime and I'd decided I was going to do just that). That list included comments but I gave up on my great re-read project after 53 books. I may restart it one day if I live long enough to get through my ever growing 'to be read' pile.
Starting around July 1978 in the list, Dan read dozens of books about the Bible and Christianity in general, hard to believe he didn't read the Bible itself. I liked Garfunkel's list better, more history and authors from earlier times. Although Garfunkel missed Carl Sandburg, Winston Churchill, Gideon Welles, Richard Feynman, Robert Heinlein, Dumas Malone, Lord Charlton, Michael Crichton, and Richard Rhodes altogether, and had very little from Isaac Asimov, Ida Tarbell, John McPhee, and David McCullough.
I drank my share of Olde English back in the day. It was cheap malt liquor.
After working our summer jobs ( I had a city job on the garbage department), my friends'd go to the city parks, play basketball for a few hours then we'd go to someone's house to play cards and pound a few. Get up the next morning and do it again.
Great memories of those college years.
The OT is extraordinarily worthwhile if you are interested in the worldview and sense of identity of the people and marratives that fed into the NT and then shaped the identity and narratives of the early Christians and subsequent church and thus Western history. It's the orienting perspective that contrasts other forms if identity and values, which we now take so much for granted it can seem irrelevant. Guvem those long lists of laws can get tedious, but even those are telling inisghts into the world and values.
That's all without assuming one believes in the God of the Bible and wants to learn what he is like. Sadly like a lot of good literature bad discussions about it in chirch or school can ruin the reading
"What do you need to do to get The New York Times to write an article about all the books your father read?"
I don't believe my father read a single book in his life. My sisters and I believe he had an undiagnosed reading disability. He could read and write but had a clear aversion to books.
One thing that a lot of people don't know about Catholics is that they don't spend a lot of time reading the Bible. They have readings of small passages during the Mass, but most Catholics do not go home to sit down and read their Bibles. In fact, many Catholics don't even own bibles.
A couple of years ago I was reminiscing about malt liquor and how when we were young we were all like "Ooooooo" "Ahhhhh" that's got a lot of alcohol in it!" (Olde English is apparently 5-8%) and the last few years I've been drinking all these IPAs that go up to 9% and everything else I'm like "4.5%? What am I supposed to even do with that?"
*sigh*
Furst, not Furth.
It's never on anyone's Top 100 lists, but an extremely influential book for me was Joseph Wambaugh's The Choirboys. Read it at 13-14 years old. The book showed me what strong, punchy dialogue looks like. It made me a better writer.
There are different ways to go about this thing we call life, but in my mind, Dan lived a life lived well and full.
RCOCEAN II, regarding the Old Testament, there is much in there if you actually read it. You missed Isaiah and Micah. Good stuff.
"And they shall beat their swords into plowshares, their spears into pruning hooks. Nation shall not lift up sword against nation. Neither shall they learn war anymore. But, they shall live, every man under his vine and under his fig tree. And none shall make them afraid."
I read from this passage at my Bar Mitzvah in 1967. And it has stayed with me throughout the years. It has not come to pass...but it's a good thought.
I am pretty sure that by the time the internet changed my world, I had already read over ten thousand books. I didn't keep a list though and regularly got pissed when I realized I was reading something I had already read. Now I only read books (electronically) on airplanes.
The problem with Christisans reading the OT, is too many of them don't understand its been superceded (for Christians) by the NT.
Further, many Protestants start imagining they're the present day "Hebrews" - which they aren't. Reading the OT is where John smith got his belief in polygamy. Hey, its in the bible isn't it?
Telling a lot of ignorant people to go "read the bible" is asking for trouble. At least the Catholic Church and Orthodox Churches provide some doctrine and guidance.
Calling others "ignorant people" when you just called the founder of Mormonism "John Smith" (it was Joseph) is a sign that it's time to step back from the keyboard and leave the rest of us along for a week at least. A month would be better, a year best of all.
The OT is all about Jews, and RCOCEANII doesn't like it one little bit. Who could have seen that coming?
I have never seen a Bible in a Roman Catholic church. Unless a heretic (heh) brought one in with him.
If the only exposure one has with reading books is in school, I could see why no one would read past that point. I read for enjoyment (and knowledge in some cases) and being asked to explain the theme of a book, to delve into the protagonist's "mind", or worse yet, the author's mind to determine meaning -- well, Jesus, it is ponderous. YMMV. Yes, it gets you to think, but am often wishing for a dead author to appear in a classroom and tell the teacher/professor that "you have NO idea what I meant to "say" via my main character". Sorta like Marshall McLuhan in "Annie Hall"
Reading & drinking never went well for me. I couldn't do it in college and still retain the material for discussions, exams, or essays. I understand the the Manson Family used to read scripture under the influence of LSD. I'm not sure if they were bent to begin with or if it was the combination, but clear headed reading seems better for any reading beyond a sports page or comic book.
Mark Twain was not that keen on the Bible or the Book of Mormon. Too many "begats" for one thing.
"The OT is all about Jews, and RCOCEANII doesn't like it one little bit. Who could have seen that coming?"
Actually, its all about the ancient Hebrews. I doubt the ADL and AJC or say, Howard stern has much in common with Moses or King David. Even though dumbshit Christian Zionists "who read the bible" think so.
And I said the 10 Commandments and the Psalms were good. You could throw in Genesis too. But thanks for reading my words closely!
Fact is, any "reading list" of the greatest books is going to include stuff that will bore someone. Everyone has different tastes and interests. I've gone through the "Modern list of the 100 best novels of the 20th century" and about 20 of them bored the crap out of me. Others were put on the list due to some sort of quota (so many women, so many Americans, so many books after 1970, etc.) or God knows what reason.
For example, I'm still trying to figure out how in the hell anyone would think "Gods little Green acre" is considered 1 of the 100 best novels.
"But thanks for reading my words closely."
Always.
When I mentioned that I think I had read 10,000 books before the internet altered my need for books, I was thinking about Wilt Chamberlin claiming to have had sex with 10,000 women over a certain period of time. When he said that, I tried to run the numbers through my head and decided it was numerically impossible. There were many many days when I read three or four books a day but the logistics of sexual encounters is much more complicated than any lending library.
"He Read (at Least) 3,599 Books in His Lifetime".
Piker.
When my wife and I got married and we combined our libraries, we ended up donating more books than that.
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