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How long will it take you to read a book?


Athena

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I found this infographic on the site Must Reads (a Dutch website), made by Personal Creations. It shows how long 'the average person' would take to read certain books or series. I feel like I've seen this before (even though the Dutch website only just posted it), so if you've seen this before, I apologise!

 

How-long-does-it-take-to-read-popular-bo

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Wow!  Ken Follett's Edge of Eternity now seems small in comparison to Song of Ice and Fire (obviously, by the comparison to that and others) and even Atlas Shrugged!  The books I've read on this, seem to be spot on- like it took me about a week for Gone With the wind and a little more than a week for Atlas Shrugged.  If I read 3 1/2 to 4 hours a day (which I did at that time), it works out.  I also like the list- a good "should read" short list!

 

I am the only one that feels stupid because it took me far more time to read most of those ?

I believe that would be if you read non- stop, all the way thorough :smile:

On that note, anyone finish Ice and Fire in 98 hours? :giggle2:  :readingtwo:

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As a Kindle reader, I go more by what percentage of the book I can read in each hour rather than by word count. If for example I manage to read 20 percent of the book in one hour, like I did with the book I started last night, then I know that I will finish it in a total of 4 hours. Word count doesn't really work for me, as there are always some bits in most books that I want to re-read in order to clarify their meaning (or sometimes to add highlights), but I guess we are all different. In the end the only thing that really matters is that you enjoy whatever it is you are reading and get something from it.

 

As for The Bible, I have read bits of it, but have never tried to read the whole thing - I have probably read more of the Gnostic texts.

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For me it really depends on the book. I can read an easy book pretty fast, but books with difficult language or difficult themes (or both) take me a lot longer (ie. old classics). In general though I read faster than the average person, I was always one of the first in class to be done with the reading, and by the time we all stopped I could've re-read the piece once or twice more, sometimes. But if lots of things happen in a book, or there is lots of information in a non-fiction read, then I need time to process it, which means I need to stop reading and think about it.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Goodreads posted this link to a site / test via Facebook, where you fill in a few questions and it tells you how fast you read and how many books you could read in a year. It's probably not entirely accurate of course, but it's fun in my opinion :).

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I did that test, Athena.  I got... 

You could read the entire Game of Thrones collection in 265 days. (159 days faster than the average person!)
Your reading speed is 339 words per minute.


But I consider myself a really slow reader, so I find this rather doubtful! :giggle2:

 

ETA:  Just how long is GoT?!  :o

Edited by Janet
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Some of it is skewed by how long you commit to reading each day I think J. I'm not a particularly fast reader but I committed to 90 minutes reading per day (which is probably about average over a week I *think*) and it seemed to think I could read the entire series in a little over 3 months, much faster than average, but I guess I read more than the average person :D

 

But 3 months?! Nah. Not a chance.

 

I must get round to the first in the series though, it's waiting on the TBR.

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The A Song of Ice and Fire series spans five books (two of them being published in two books instead of one), my versions have:

 

856

752

688

656

976

690

557

 

pages, that includes 50-100 pages of family trees. That's 5175 pages in total, including 350-700 pages of the family trees.

 

I have to agree, I don't think the test is all that realistic. It doesn't take into account that some books take a lot longer to be read than others, based on their exact language (for example, reading a classic takes me a lot longer), and the time one needs to process the words read.

 

My results were:

 

"You could read the entire Game of Thrones collection in 24 days. (400 days faster than the average person!)

 

Your reading speed is 411 words per minute.

 

If you read for 3 hours each day, you could get through 272 books per year (based on the average length of a bestseller - 99,390 words)."

 

(I don't read for 3 hours each day though, I don't know how much I read each day, sometimes I don't read a whole lot but sometimes I can spend more than 3 hours reading, such as during a read-a-thon).

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I said I could commit to 40 minutes a day, and apparently I could read the entire collection in 150 days. :thud:

 

My reading speed is 300 words per minute.

 

Not sure about that....I don't consider myself a fast reader, and some books I really struggle with (and Games of Thrones series would be one of those :D ).

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  • 4 weeks later...

You could read the entire Game of Thrones collection in 24 days. (400 days faster than the average person!)

 

Oof, that would take some doing...

 

I've been described as a fast reader by others, but haven't really ever taken the time to do a words-per-minute count or anything like that. I suppose, like others, it depends on the difficulty of the text I'm reading and how much time I have to commit to it. I think tests like this are a fairly interesting experiment, but that the most important thing is enjoyment.

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