The typical paperback fiction can be easily read in 4 hours. Some like Robert Parker can be read in 3 hours.
There are exceptions. Tom Clancy requires a couple days. His plots are so complicated.
Reading a book means every page. But, any fast reader tends to scan a page. I don’t read and think about every word.
I don’t read all day anymore. My eyes dry out and get tired. Three hours is my limit.
This. When I was learning to read as a child, I learned to read fast (Long, boring story why). Most novels take less than a plane ride. That’s why I love Kindle and the app - I can carry thousands of books on a trip and never run out of things to read.
Tom Clancy goes a lot faster when you learn how to filter out all the tech porn.
I was on an approximately 12 hour flight with my sister and brother. They had books, I had a Kindle. My sister expressed surprise that I was the one with the Kindle. I explained that we were taking two 12 hour flights, I was unlikely to spend any time sleeping on the plane, and we were spending a week at our destination - and that would mean I would have to bring a minimum of five books, since I would probably read at least three and need to have one or two extra in case I can’t get interested in a couple of them.
I can read most genre fiction at two pages a minute. I once clocked reading a mystery by Donald Westlake, who has an especially clear style, at three pages a minute. My wife, in retirement, has on rare occasion hit an extreme of reading 14 hours a day, and so can read the fattest fantasy in that time or a couple of mysteries. Neither of us can do that for serious nonfiction, of course.
Defining “read” is fuzzier than it seems. If I start a book and just never bother to finish it for whatever reason, I don’t consider it read. But I’ve learned I don’t have to force myself to read every page of a big nonfiction book; if there’s a section or a chapter that doesn’t interest me I can skip it and not look back. That book is still read. Same, even more so, for a book of essays.
Heck, both my wife and I have found that some awful mysteries should be started and then skipped to the last chapter to see who the murderer is. That book is “read” as in I’ll never read that again.
My rule of thumb for reading is 100 pages an hour. There’s variation, of course, but it really only slows down if I can’t get into the book. If I become immersed, the pages fly by.
These days, it’s finding the time to read. It can take a week to read a book, simply because I’m reading it during “downtime”, and there’s not much downtime.
I was a reading kid and I don’t doubt Francie one bit–I’d hit the library once a week, check out about a dozen books and return them all, read, the next week. I’ve slowed down considerably but according to Kindle I’ve been averaging a bit over a book a week for the past few years, have a streak of 196 weeks/940 days going. I read every day, at least a little bit, and always have for approximately sixty years. If you count all the internet reading I do it’s probably thousands of words a day, 7 days a week. I like reading. 
Yeah, if you count all the internet reading I do, then it probably equals around a book a day.
If you only count the number of books I read, it’s a whole lot lower.
Agreeing with this. If I quit before the end, I don’t say (or think) that I read it; only that I read enough of it to decide that I didn’t want to read it; and if I only skimmed it, skipping sections or only glancing at them, that doesn’t count as having read it either. But while I often read introductions and endnotes, I don’t consider them required; and dedications aren’t part of the book at all, IMO. Poems or songs, however, for me are part of the book, and I definitely read them.
And also agreeing with those saying it’s entirely plausible to read a book a day, or to read well over a hundred in a year. It does, at least for me, depend a great deal both on the book in question and on what else is going on in my life. The Dawn of Everything, for instance, is going to take me several weeks, during which I’m also doing a whole lot of other things – but a miscellaneous mystery story may be one long evening spent in front of the wood stove in winter.
These days I do way too much of my reading online, and most of that is in short chunks.
Makes sense to me.
Which is odd, as I spent a lot of time trying to explain that to others.
I know people who basically read by looking at the letters and figuring out what word they spell, and then going on to the next. Then there are those who read one word at a time. But I’ve always read more or less sentences at a time, or at least phrases.
Out of curiosity, how good are you at picking out a single word in the middle of a paragraph? I always thought that was an easy skill, until I discovered that most people can’t just look at a page and find a keyword.
In any case, I assume that this is a highly biased sample, as people who spend their time reading and writing on this board are probably going to be better than average at both.
I think I’m good at it, but don’t know what the basis of comparison is. Are you talking about, say, hunting back through a book looking for previous mentions of a character’s name? I know I can often find such, but don’t know how to tell how many I miss.
I remember a passage that I want to go check or cite, so I start flipping back through pages. And it’s not there. It’s never there! Never!
This thread has made me think about how much I’ve read. I’m pretty sure I’m in the Billion Word Club, including newspapers, magazines, journals, and all the words read on the internet over 25 years. I love reading and I love words.
I would’ve thought all educated adults read like this? My six year old reads a word at a time for words she knows and figures out the word from the letters for words she doesn’t know or doesn’t see often. I don’t consider this to be “fluent” reading.
Presidents in Teddy Roosevelt’s day didn’t have a side gig at McDonalds.
High reading speeds are fairly common. I read 1000wpm with 100% comprehension. Of course, I can’t remember shit, so there that.
I can read a book a day but with the internet and TV it is more like one thick new book a week, but a old fave I am re-reading, I can do in a day or two. Non-fiction can take longer, depending.
But yeah, by “read” I mean finish it and not just skim.
Yep, I concur. Few pictures or music here, just walls of text.
My father was an avid reader, and after he retired he likely averaged a book every two days; but he would read many hours a day.
I mostly read historic nonfiction, and read for 100% comprehension. If I do not understand something I back up a couple line and try again, if that does not work I back up a couple paragraphs and try again, and so on.
My latest book is a bit over 1,000 pages of densely packed text, and concepts; so, it is likely going to take a couple weeks to complete – if it holds my interest.
But if I do not reach the end, no I did not read it.
I read word by word. Always have. I hear the text in my head as I read it. So did Abraham Lincoln. My lips don’t move like his did though.
Fluent? I dunno. I have written four fanfiction novels though. Word by word.
So you read one word and don’t know what the next word is until you’ve finished reading the current word?
I hear the words in my head as well, but I can glance at a group of words and know what they are. For example when reading to my daughters I can glance at the book, absorb a sentence, then look at them while saying the words, glancing back down for the next group of words as I’m finishing the first group.
I could probably guess the next word, but yeah, I look at all the words. I start from the left and move my eyes to the right. If you just assume what the group of words you’re looking at says, you’re going to miss a lot of nuance.
I only count books I’ve read all the way through. I’m judging a contest where I got a lot of books, and have to pick a winner and some finalists. Most of the books I can trash after reading about 10% (some take only a few pages) and I don’t count any of them as being read.
In High School I started keeping tracks of the sf books I bought, when and where I bought them, and when I read them. I just entered that into my book database. I was doing two a day. But that was long before the internet. The only competition reading had was 7 TV channels.
Last year I read about 90 books.
I don’t track how fast I read things, since I’ve found that my reading rate varies wildly with different authors. That would be an interesting metric to collect.
I’m looking at several words at once; just like somebody reading word by word looks at several letters at once. It’s not a matter of reading one word and guessing what the next several are.
At any rate, that’s what it feels like. The continuous chatter in my head that’s always going, whether I’m reading or not, rattles the words off one at a time, much faster than anyone could actually pronounce them (and I don’t “hear” that chatter as if it made an actual sound.) But then, that chatter’s not saying all the letters at once, either; so it’s still the same sort of thing as reading word by word instead of letter by letter.