How Long Would it Take You to Read a Book

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of, say, 300 pages?

I am putting together a reading list. I am a slow reader. I was wondering what the average rates are for Wrong Planet types.

Some people I know can read two such books in a night...others require a fortnight

Depends on the book. Harry Potter, my family and I could get through within a week, sometimes up at night to finish chapters, as we were many people wanting to read one book (whichever was the most recent, or even the earlier ones again), and it was like an itch that you have to scratch--it couldn't wait.

Others one absorbs slowly or wants to ponder for a while before coming to it again.

Others, one wants to read and re-read the same lines (written well, or, conversely, hard to decipher) so that would take a long time too.

I've never finished a book of Shakespeare's sonnets, as just a few in a go are so captivating and enriching that I don't feel the need to go back- or, want to keep close to what little is read at a time-- like a newly found treasure.

I also am a slow reader. I think it’s because my brain stores everything, because it thinks absolutely everything is important or the author wouldn’t have written it (caused me endless problems in school, for example trying to write summaries), I don’t skip a single word in anything I read (what faster readers tend to do is just skim through parts they deem as less important, is what I’ve been told).

Anyway, a three hundred page book? Probably from one to four weeks, depending on how interesting it is and exactly how much of my time I’m devoting to reading. My average reading time is one book a month, but the average length of the books I read is probably around 500 pages.

I'm not so much a slow reader as an easily distracted, inefficient one. EVERYTHING ELSE has a claim on my attention when I try to read a page: a breeze, the internet, local cats...my eyes refuse to stay trained on the page for very long. I take Strattera which helps some, but I still am a poor reader. Which makes my decision to commit to a large reading project masochistic

TRUE but then if one allows oneself to succumb to the book, one can forget everything else, and make a mess of real life from neglect, forgetfulness, etc, all from being too enthralled and not knowing how to snap out of it like NTs can

quickest i read a 300 page book was about 2 hours, this was when i was a youth and my eyesight, attention and recall were much better. now it'd take a week at the least. the book i speed-read was "a light in the forest." i remembered the material just long enough to do a required book report that morning, i got up early and read the danged thing as i'd put it off for a week. i don't remember one bit of it now, decades later.

In theory, many people can read about a page a minute. This varies a lot, of course, from person to person and depending on how difficult the writing or the material is, etc. According to this rule of thumb, it should take about 5 hours to read a 300 page book. That actually sounds doable for me if it isn't a very dense book and I am sufficiently interested in it.

6 hours if I'm interested. 10 if I'm not. It really depends on the word count. Condensed pages and all that.

I'm a very slow reader. I have to read every word and can't skim read a book. My current book (non fiction - I only occasionally read fiction) has 600 pages and will probably take me a couple of months to read. I used to find it frustrating that I couldn't skim read but I don't really mind nowadays. It's a somewhat specialist book written by an acknowledged expert on the subject and I would prefer to spend plenty of time with it anyway. My books are my friends so why would I want to rush them?

Non-fiction really does differ from fiction. I would guess most people read non-fiction much slower.

When I was a teenager it would take me an evening to read 300 pages of fiction. These days I pretty much never finish books because I’m constantly distracted doing mom and wife stuff.

The only fiction book I remember reading and specifically noticing how long it took was several years ago. I remember because I was “not supposed” to read it since I had a course load of college books to read as well. It was 800 pages and it took me under a week, and I was simultaneously reading some non-fiction school book that was probably around 300 pages.

The fiction book is still one of the best I have ever read! Maybe I should reread it...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pillars_of_the_Earth

It doesn’t matter.

It’s more important to understand what you read than reading fast.

As Blooie stated, it depends upon one’s motivation, and the style of the author.

Back in my youth I used to read 200 wpm. I read the entire inhertiance cycle in 4 days a little ove ra month ago. That's hmm Around 3k Pages.

As others have said, it depends on the book. If we're talking about average science and history books, I can comfortably read 50 pages in an hour. I can read ~20 pages of a science textbook in an hour, including time to highlight and annotate. With fiction, it's more like 80 pages in an hour, but it depends on the author's style and how engaged I am with the plot. In high school, I read Jane Eyre in two days and Atlas Shrugged in about two weeks. I don't usually speed through books, though, especially with nonfiction. Last semester, I spent like a month inching my way through Something Deeply Hidden, which is a book on quantum mechanics. If I'm unfamiliar with a subject, it takes me a long time to get the hang of it.

Depends on the size of the print and page, and thus the number of words on each page, am I right?

Some books you need to slow down, they were designed to be read almost aloud to yourself, every single word...like Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, Proust's In Search of Lost Time, or James Joyce's Ulysses. And that's the best stuff right there.

Depends on the size of the print and page, and thus the number of words on each page, am I right?

Yep. In fact, I just found out to my horror that I am now unable to read many traditionally bound books. Apparently my Kindle, with its ability to enlarge text, has spoiled my aging eyes. I finally got a book from an Interlibrary Loan that I have been dying to read*...and reading it would have killed me


*Zarathustra's Secret : the interior life of Friedrich Nietzsche, by Joachim Köhler