When Dan Pelzer died in Columbus, Ohio, on July 1 at the age of 92, he was remembered as a voracious reader, one who made frequent use of the Whitehall Branch of the Columbus Metropolitan Library. In the aftermath of his death, however, the world discovered his reading habits were far more extensive and thorough than anyone could have imagined: From 1962 until his eyesight failed in 2023, Pelzer read more than 80 books a year—3,599 in all.
How do we know? He kept an annotated list of them all.
It is an encouraging story for all lovers of books—and a rebuke to all of us who are spending our summer on TikTok. A perusal of his typewritten and handwritten list (his children have digitized it) shows Mr. Pelzer to have been an omnivorous and open-minded reader. It includes everything from The Odyssey and Ulysses to The World According to Garp and the novels of John Grisham. Though Pelzer was a devout Catholic (and a former Jesuit novice), The New York Times reported that the Bible did not make his list—though his son said he had read it a dozen times. Many other books by Catholic authors made the cut, however, from the novels of George Bernanos to the medieval mysticisms of Anne Catherine Emmerich.
Pelzer’s list might be a bit too eclectic—and lengthy—to serve as a useful guide to some good summer reading. (It’s still summer! It’s not even August!) But there are plenty of unexpected treasures to be found in it. And over the years, the editors of America have compiled similar, if much shorter, lists of recommended reading that can be equally helpful.
Sometimes those lists were lighthearted collections of suggestions for summer page-turners; sometimes they were hectoring assignments of what kind of literature a Catholic should read to keep on the straight and narrow. Suffice it to say that for several generations, the editors subscribed to the conviction of America’s founder, John J. Wynne, S.J., that part of a moral life was steering clear of dodgy literature. “How can [readers] set their minds on higher things when they allow themselves to be titillated by what is low and degrading? Keep the sensational paper with its menu of murders, divorces, scandal and moral depravity out of your homes,” he wrote in 1909.
In 1929, America literary editor Francis Talbot, S.J., lamented what trashy novels were doing to our youth:
The task of the Church and the parent to preserve virtuous minds in the young people has been rendered almost impossible by the widening laxity of our literature. Wise warnings and gentle counselings are easily forgotten amidst the incitements of a glamorous story of passion. Life as it is lived by lascivious characters is reflected in the modern novel, and from the novel that life is again reflected into the souls of the readers. The writers mould the readers to their own image.
For much of America’s history, regular entries on “Lenten Reading” and “Moral Literature” tended to be the preferred strategy of the editors. Not exactly what you want to read when you’ve got sand between your toes, no? But like Pelzer’s list, even these usually offered some forgotten or overlooked gems.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the Catholic Library Association released a list of recommended reading every year “to signalize Catholic Book Week” (there’s a word that has fallen out of fashion), and America literary editor Harold Gardiner, S.J., liked to list which selections on that list had also been reviewed in the magazine. In 1962 (a year right smack in the middle of an extraordinary blossoming of American Catholic literary output), this list included Edwin O’Connor’s The Edge of Sadness and Romano Guardini’s The Life of Faith, as well as Strangers in the House, by a young Andrew Greeley. And, proving that some things never change, there was a recommendation for a book titled The Church in Crisis.
A decade ago, America’s then-literary editor, Raymond Schroth, S.J., offered something more comprehensive: a list of 150 essays on 270 books, composed by faculty and staff at four of the five Jesuit universities where he taught. It is an astonishing treasure trove (accessible here in PDF form) and a reminder that Father Schroth himself was a formidable polymath and a prodigious reader (and reviewer). His fellow professors also didn’t all lie about what they were really reading: While a suspicious number of high-brow classics appear in the compendium, they are joined by encomia to Jules Verne and Leon Uris as well.
Just last summer, the editors compiled a list of suggestions with a specific locale in mind: the beach. The list is a bit wonkier than what you might find on the table inside Barnes & Noble, but it’s a good one. Entries included the novels of Sally Rooney, Michael Finkel’s The Art Thief (which I am reading now, a year late), Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, Peter Brown’s Augustine of Hippo and even Albert Camus’s The Plague, because that’s an uplifting beach read. A list from the year before had some equally serious fare, including The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Motherhood, and the Mind-Baby Problem, by Julie Phillips, and When We Left Cuba, by Chanel Cleeton. But there are some mystery novels in there as well….
One might also draw inspiration from America’s advertisements, which have sometimes been a bit more daring than its editorial content. Ads for books of a certain genre are no exception. In 1981, for example, the magazine ran an advertisement for a racy novel by the aforementioned Father Andrew Greeley, The Cardinal Sins, which was a popular beach read that summer. The tagline? “A Man of God is still a Man.” Oh my!
•••
Our poetry selection for this week is “Question,” by Deirdre Lockwood. Readers can view all of America’s published poems here.
Members of the Catholic Book Club: We are taking a hiatus while we retool the Catholic Book Club and pick a new selection.
In this space every week, America features reviews of and literary commentary on one particular writer or group of writers (both new and old; our archives span more than a century), as well as poetry and other offerings from America Media. We hope this will give us a chance to provide you with more in-depth coverage of our literary offerings. It also allows us to alert digital subscribers to some of our online content that doesn’t make it into our newsletters.
Other recent Catholic Book Club columns:
- Why the moon turns out thoughts to God
- The atomic nightmare turns 80
- Anne Carr, the ‘founding mother’ of Catholic feminism in academia
- David Tracy was more than a theologian
- The priest-detectives of American fiction
Happy reading!
James T. Keane
