So I got the new Stephen King book Under the Dome and it’s just over 1000pgs. I’m curious how long it takes most people to finish a book this large.
Assuming that it’s a book that you are enjoying, though maybe not rabidly loving. It’s fiction and not incredibly heavy reading (assume its a Stephen King book).
How many pgs/hr do you read?
How many hours would you normally devote to a book in a day?
How many days would it take you to finish a book this size?
I tend to read about 40 pgs/hour. I’m a slow reader. I figure it’s going to take me a month to finish this book as I can only devote a couple hours a day to it.
I’ve never attempted to measure my speed per word or page or anything. But the first hundredish pages of a 1k page book would probably take about 2-5 days. Then, were it interesting enough, I’d read the rest In a day or so. It generally takes a while for me to “get into” a book. But once I’m into it I can’t put it down.
Depends on what else I’m doing; currently, I pretty much only read for fun while cooking or traveling. The last Pratchett I got, I read almost in one sitting (with breaks due to things like having class, having to stop because I was laughing too hard and refueling), it took me some four hours. It’s 496 pages.
So it looks like the case proposed in the OP would take about 8 hours.
If I’m just reading, that is, if I’m not currently engaged in any other leisure activity, and I like the book, it’ll take me about half a day. Usually I do several different leisure activities each day, such as reading this board, computer/video games, reading or re-reading a book for pleasure, as opposed to reading for education, some needlework, etc.
When I was on bed rest, I was going through 3-5 novels a day. This was back in the late 70s, when novels (especially science fiction novels) were much shorter, but I read both newspapers daily, and I believe that I was also reading two newsmagazines (Time and US News and World Report, I believe) and several other SF magazines every month, as well. Again, this was back in the late 70s, and at the time we only had broadcast TV, and I’m not much of a TV watcher anyway.
It takes me about 5-6 hours to finish a thick fantasy novel if I’m really into it. (700-800 pages? I’m not sure.) On long flights I forcibly slow my pace down so I don’t go through all my books too quickly.
I think I read The Stand in 2-3 days. I don’t have time nowdays to sit for hours and hours just to read.
Some people are slow readers, my brother never managed to beat his dyslexia and reads something like 10 words per minute. Others read in a more normal range, 40-90 words per minute, I tested in 6th grade at 800 words per minute. I could do one of the old SRA reading comprehension folders in under a minute. Only think that kept me from finishing the entire box in a day was having to share with the rest of the class.
I can speed read [deliberately reading as fast as possible, not for entertainment] at 2500 words per minute at 80% comprehension as tested when I was in college. I prefer not to read that fast.
I carry my library of electronic books on my phone, previously I carried it in a palm PDA. I could finish the new King novel in about 4 or 5 hours.
I’m pretty sure I’ve never read a novel in a single sitting. Unless I’m stuck somewhere with nothing else to do, I usually read only about 40 to 50 pages in a shot, i.e., I’m reading in those small parcels of time when I don’t have to do anything else. So it’s difficult to calculate how long it would take.
Also, I’m a pretty slow reader, often suffering from the ‘read the same paragraph 4 or 5 times’ curse, because something in the paragraph takes me on a different train of thought and although I’m reading the words on the page, my mind is elsewhere.
Guestimating, I would say, for a 1000 page book that I really enjoyed, it would take me about three weeks to finish, but for a 1000 page book that I wasn’t enjoying so much, maybe 6 weeks.
I like to go through the dialogue as naturally as possible, as though I were reading a play. I like to sort of play a movie in my mind as I go through a novel. I figure about 10-20 pages per hour.
This is also how I tend to read threads here; as though the posters were actually speaking to one another.
The newest 900 page Diana Gabaldon novel took me about 5 days to read, in between work and life. Some days I can read quickly, other days I fall asleep the second my eyes rest on the page.
I’m a fast reader. I read a 400+ page John Grisham novel in about 6 hours… that’s a guess as it was on a 13-hour-long flight last week. Started it over Newfoundland and finished over the Black Sea with time for a meal and a nap.
Stephen King - I can’t put his books down ever (well except Hearts in Atlantis) so I could totally wrap that up in a day or two. Depends on the distractions, thought with SK, I am pretty resistant to distraction.
If it’s fiction, I’ll burn through it in no time. I generally read for entertainment at a little better than 800 wpm. Of course, it helps if you know the author and style before starting. Tom Clancy just flies, because I know when to skip paragraphs (hell, pages!) of description and dive in again when the plot resurfaces. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, OTOH, I tend to read more slowly. It also depends on how well I like the story. New Terry Pratchett tends to get read in one or two intense evenings.
If I’ve got all day, like I’m sick or whatever, and I’m into it like a good Stephen King book (not, say, The Tommyknockers) I’ll take it down in a day. I’m just a fast reader, is all, and when I’m really into it I don’t put it down. I’ve been burning through those little JD Robb mysteries lately and read three in two days so far - if it’s a pageturner, I read fast. If I don’t have a lot of time, maybe a week.
Yeah, I’m a fast reader too! Depending on the writing and my interest in it, if I had no distractions and found it compelling I could read it in a day, no worries.
I actually went through a phase where I was bored with regular sized books as they were over and done so quickly. I was hooked on great big books for a time in my youth. I found ‘The Alexandria Quartet’ and was in heaven, y’know, for a week or so!
I thought I was a fast reader but some of you guys are nuts.
I typically read at about a page a minute. I can read faster but my comprehension slips and I typically don’t want to miss anything. If I’m enjoying the book 1000 pages typically takes me a day but that is a day where I don’t do anything else except have a TV or music on in the background. With work, TV shows I want to watch, working out, and surfing the internet I only have about 2 ½ hours a day to read and then it still has to a real good book to get that much time.