What Dan Read
Yesterday’s post about the challenge of deciding what I’m going to read next was in the back of my mind when I stumbled on What Dan Read, a scanned copy of the list of 3,599 books that Dan Pelzer read from 1962 until shortly before he died this past July. The scanned copy is intriguing, but I found it difficult to read. If you have the same challenge, you can find a more readable copy, a pdf provided by the public library in Columbus, Ohio. The list alone is rather heart-warming, especially in this day when Americans are reading less for pleasure.
I admit I didn’t look at every item on the list, but what I find there is impressive. He didn’t like everything he read (the Smithsonian reports his comment about Joyce’s Ulysses: “The worst. Pure torture”), but apparently he finished what he started..
I admit to a bit of reader’s envy — I’ve done a better job recently of tracking books that I read, and I can recall many that I read before I was carefully tracking them. I’d like to have a full list now.
But the mention of Joyce’s Ulysses brings back a painful memory. I read the book in college, under the direction of a professor who had written his dissertation on Joyce. I didn’t find it torture at all — one of my most vivid reading memories is the excitement I felt as I neared the end of Molly Bloom’s stream of consciousness monologue. I’m quite sure, though, that I wouldn’t have been able to finish the book without the guidance of the professor — my paperback copy was filled with marginal notations prompted by insights he brought to our discussion.
Some might be wondering why I introduced this as a painful memory. The pain came a few years later, when someone broke into my apartment and took all sorts of things. I was a poor graduate student and really didn’t have much of any value. But the most painful loss was that paperback copy of Ulysses. I hope that person found the notes useful.
