Urk. I’m having an attack of pph envy. 300 pages per hour? My normal “casual reading” speed for a hardcover book is about a page a minute, so if I’d read OOTP straight through it would’ve been over 13 hours.
For the record, I read Stephen King’s The Drawing of the Three in one day. not 'cause I thought it was a great read, but because I was stuck in a car on an all-day roadtrip.
I am a notoriously fast reader.
When I was in high school I got a cushy summer babysitting job: 11-year-old kid, single dad worked second shift. I was at their house from noon to ten or so, kid basically hung out with his friends, I made sure he ate and went to bed on time. I was an Ellery Queen freak that year and on a good day I could suck down two novels in a row. Thank you, Public Library. 
Another time we were assigned The Count of Monte Cristo. I started it right away in class, read it on the bus home from school, read it during dinner, read it in my room after dinner and finished around 2 AM. For some reason it just sucked me in. But now I don’t recall much of it. I should read it again.
Unfortunately I don’t do as much pleasure reading as I would like these days. For my job I have a big stack of most of A Famous Author’s books here (for reference only), an author of whom I am a big fan, and I’ve been thinking how delicious it would be to just read them all again, start to finish.
I read the first six books of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series in about four days. (I am a university student, so I had quite a bit of free time, but I didn’t skip class for it or anything.)
Then again, afterwards I got online on the fan sites and realized I had missed HUGE ideas in the series. Don’t know how to do spoilers or I’d give an example. Anyway, I went back and re-read them over 2 weeks and got a lot more out of them.
Well, the fastest I’ve ever read a book was some crappy sci-fi novel (might have been a doctor who book) - probably about 2, 3 hundred pages. Finished it over a lunchbreak sitting in the school library (about an hour). Never quite reached that level of speed reading before or since.
Generally speaking I can finish a new novel in an evening - sit down and start reading it at around 5:00, maybe a bit earlier, and come to at around 1:00 having finished it. More heavy going books of course take longer.
I think I read the first two, maybe the third as well, Harry Potter books on a plane trip. A fairly long plane trip - about 6 to 8 hours - but still pretty fast.
I am however a major book addict, and read far too much. If I didn’t read fast I’d have no free time for anything other than reading.
Heck, I can read Go Dog, Go in, like, 60 seconds.
Seriously, though, I read Of Mice and Men in about two hours.
It’s a fairly short book, though.
I read Faye Kellerman’s “Prayers for the Dead” in about 5 hours. Once I started it I just couldn’t put it down.
When I was about 12 or 13 I borrowed 3 or 4 of the Chronicles of Narnia books from a friend with the condition that I just HAD to return them the next day before his parents found out. Apparently he wasn’t allowed to lend things to people or something. :rolleyes: Anyway, after school I worked my way through all of them. I think it was too much to process because I honestly don’t remember too much about them. Oh and it snowed that night and school was closed so I ended up keeping them for another day anyway! D’oh!
If I find a good book I will usually go through it in a weekend if I can make the time but there are lots of books that I only took a day to read such as:
*The Silence of the Lambs
Misery
The Vampire Lestat
Queen of the Damned
*
When I started them I just couldn’t put them down.
I read pretty quickly, though I slow down for some for denser or more intellectual material. The fifth Harry Potter took me about five or six hours; I read The Devil in the White City this weekend and that took me about three hours. I think I probably average about 100 pages an hour or so.
When I first got into Grisham’s writing I read a few of his books in either one or two nights each.
Depends on the size of the book, how absorbing or challenging the content is and my schedule of course, but anywhere from an hour or two to a two or three days. I work full time, have weekly volunteer responsiblities and a family and I manage to routinely read two books a week. I almost always have a book handy in the car or in by bag.
I read Dean R Koontz (sp?) “Watchers” in a day, back in Highschool, during summer vacation. That same summer I regularly finished a whole bunch of Koontz (as well as Steven King, and a few sci-fi novels) novels fairly quickly.
I never really thought about it before but the talk of road trips made me remember. IIRC, in 5th grade or so, I read War of the Worlds on a trip. I would guess it was about 5 hours of reading for over 200 pages.
I would love to be able to read a page per minute atleast. Sigh.
Since this is basically a poll, I’ll move it to IMHO for you.
Cajun Man
for the SDMB
Whenever I get a new Terry Pratchett book, I’ll be done with it inside of 6-8 hours.
I chewed through The Amityville Horror in about four and a half hours. At night. When I was thirteen and extremely impressionable.
I’m not the voracious reader I used to be, though. I used to be able to sit or lie in bed and read for hours at a stretch. Now I need to get up and move around or “rest my eyes” for a few minutes every hour or so.
I read a reasonably thick novel in about four or five hours in the car once (I was bored and it was someone else’s book, so I had to finish it before we got home) - it was about an artificial human thing, I seem to remember it as being by Danielle Steele, but that doesn’t seem right.
I can’t remember all the books I’ve sat down with and read straight through, though the one that really sticks in my mind is Great Expectations, read in about ten hours on the last day of winter break in tenth grade (forgot about the assignment). I didn’t much care for it then, and I know I should probably give it another (more leisurely) shot, but twenty years of hard feelings is tough to overcome.
Who Moved My Cheese?
Ten minutes flat. 
I read Brave New World, Catcher in the Rye, and 1984 in one day over the course of about 12 hours or so.
I did The Winds of War, War And Remembrance, and The Caine Mutiny (I was on a Wouk kick) in a week.
I regularly finish any new book that I buy in a day, rarely longer than 3 days, and that’s usually because I’m reading about 10-15 books at a time and I put it down and start to read another one, only to go back to it later.
OOTP in 24 hours, including sleep and class (and the fact that I get ill if I read in the car). These days I don’t read many books. I also read Beowulf in prose poetry (and understood it) in three hours.