Christine, in about four hours.
If I get time, I can polish off most books over the course of a day, though that rarely happens anymore.
About 8 hours for the dystopian triple crown (We, Brave New World, 1984) in one go. I didn’t sleep well that night…
I breezd though Vonnegut’s Galapagos in two hours, laughing the whole way. I never even got it past the library doors before I finished, either.
I don’t know my best time… I don’t remember how long it took me to read OOTP as that was a while ago…
Just this weekend my MIL took the daughter and left Dean Koontz’s latest book. When she got back 3 hours later I had 10 pages left and had had lunch and cleaned the house. He’s fluff reading though so I get through his stuff pretty quickly.
I remember when my friend lent me Hannibal and my husband was away because of work. I started that when I got home from work and finished a little after midnight.
I also just read Shindler’s List. That one took me an hour here or there over two days simply because I kept having to put it down due to kids needing stuff and the sadness of the story.
Let’s see.
Short stuff: “Great Gatsby” in well under an hour.
Standard paperbacks: two hours tops.
Long paperbacks: “Dune” in about 4 hours.
I read Franken’s “Lies and the lying liars…” during the Super Bowl. But I spent a lot of that time doing other things. I believe I read about half of it during the halftime show.
Stephenson’s Big Books are about the only things I’ve read lately that take multiple evenings.
It’s like the STephen King convention in here!
Fastest read: Bag of Bones, 24 hours. It’s a huge book, but it was an awesome, awesome story, and I literally couldn’t put it down. I bought it on a Friday night in the checkout line of the supermarket, took it home, and by dinner the next night, it was complete.
And then I was pissed at myself for having read it so quickly.
*By huge, I of course mean, huge to read in 24 hours. I have no idea why I felt compelled to clarify that.
I can’t remember how many books I’ve read in less than a day. The most recent was probably “Pattern Recognition” by William Gibson.
But the last time I really managed to impress myself was a summer or two back, when I was housesitting with nothing to do, and I read The Hobbit and the LOTR trilogy all within three or four days.
I took about three hours to finish Order of the Phoenix.
His books have ideas?
I got started on them, got up to about volume 6 or 7 and realized he is just telling the same story over and over and over…
90 minutes, timed. Booyah! 
27th Evil, I believe you’re the only other non-Russian I’ve ever met who’s read We. Cool book, huh?
Hm, lessee… I’m pretty sure I read Goblet of Fire in one sitting, probably somewhere between six and eight hours. I stayed up late to read it… another case of resisting Harry Potter for years until the ex-stepdaughter got Philosopher’s Stone for her birthday. Can’t recall any other speed records, but I find if I read the heavy stuff (which I prefer) too long, my attention starts to wander and my eyes just glide over the text. So I break my reading up now.
???
300 pages an hour
= 5 pages per minute
= 12 seconds per page.
That’s almost just flipping pages.
Now, I understand that some people read faster than others, but the other “fast” readers in this thread are talking about going through about 70 pph for fiction.
People think I read fast, and I get through about 60 pph reading fiction.
Now I’ve read a book in a day, but it was maybe a 450 page book that I read straight for 8 hours.
When I was an adolescent I self-checked my reading speed and found that I averaged about a page a minute. I’ve never bothered to check my speed again, but I know I’m faster than average because people at school/work were always impressed by how quickly I could read through worksheets, instructions, and reports.
When it comes to pleasure reading, I don’t read as quickly as I can. I like to take my time, think about the book, and enjoy the experience. However, I did knock off Whitley Steiber’s The Hunger (357 p., all page counts from Amazon) in about two hours because it wasn’t very good and I saw no reason to drag the experience out. I normally would have abandoned a book I liked so little, but I’d seen the film version a good half dozen times and was determined to make it through the source material.
Once flight problems left me stranded at the Indianapolis airport for several hours, during which time I ate dinner, puchased Terry Pratchett’s The Last Continent (416 p.) at the airport bookstore, and read it almost straight through since I had nothing better to do. I can’t remember exactly how long I spent with the book, but it was probably five or six hours. That’s a considerably slower rate that with The Hunger, but that’s because I actually liked The Last Continent (although it’s not my favorite Discworld book by a long shot).
For heavier novels or scholarly works I’m slower and need more breaks. I think it took me about two weeks to read Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum (560 p.) for the first time.
I think it has to do with how you read…
When I read a book my brain takes in each line as someone else might take in a single word. So a book with fairly large print like the one on my desk right now has 34 lines per page. It is not unreasonable to take in one page in just a few seconds…
I’m most comfortable reading between 60 and 100 pages per hour, depending on the typeset. I can read faster than that, but I no longer find the reading as relaxing. As long as so many people are comparing OotP, it took me about 12 or 13 hours to finish it, if I can recall correctly.
Arthur C. Clarke’s CHILDHOOD’S END overnight, several volumes of Christopher Pike’s THE LAST VAMPIRE in four hours each (car trips), & Vonnegut’s GOD BLESS YOU MR. ROSEWATER in 5 hrs (bus trip).
I read Michael Chricton’s Prey in one day–prolly about five hours of reading.
I just finished The Da Vinci Code in one day–about 5 solid hours of reading.
DVC = 460 pages
460/5 = 92 pph
92/60 = 1.5 ppm
I read pretty fast, but not quite ridiculously so.
12 seconds is a mighty long time when you’re reading, friend.
If iampunha posts numbers for prose, as opposed to his time for Beowulf, and his total time including time spent not reading for OotP, then you’ll see another very fast reader.
Yes, well, in a country where people can run two miles an hour at best, someone who can run five is fast. Most people can’t read very quickly.
Most of the reason I can read so much in so little time is experience. For the past ten years I’ve been devouring and redevouring books. The majority of my time was spent reading, and thus I got very fast. I also tend to read a line or two at a glance instead of five or six words.
That’s exactly how it is for me too. I’ve always seemed to be one of the fastest readers in my circle of friends and acquaintences. I only know a few people IRL who read faster than me (not that I’m taking a poll, or anything!). And obviously, there are people on this board who are scary-fast, and I ain’t that.
I’m currently taking an online course, which requires a lot of reading. The teachers predict how much studying time a person needs to finish the course, and I’m finding that while I still have to take my time on some of the exercises, the reading part just isn’t as time-consuming as I’d been led to believe. I think that the administrators of this course are giving study time estimates based on the average reading speed, and I go much faster than that. Which is cool! 
I need all the edge I can get with this course!
It seems to me that a lot of us average out to between 50-90 pages per minute (depending on content of book, denseness of text on page, etc.). That seems to not be a terribly uncommon speed for the voracious reader. However, there are plenty who read slower than that, just because that’s the way they are, or because they enjoy savoring the book at a slower pace. I can understand savoring the book. I don’t want to go through it so fast that it’s a blur.
One of my sisters is visually impaired, and has to put her books under a special magnifying machine to read them. She says it takes her a long time. She vaguely remembers the time before her eyes went to crap, and she said she could devour a few books from the library in a day or two. She says that she doesn’t mind reading “slower” now (I don’t think she’s that slow—probably more like “average”), because she gets to savor the book. It isn’t over too soon.
My mom also reads on the slow side (relatively speaking) but she loves to read and is always into something. Books, books, books! They are a huge part of our life.
Jesus on a pogo stick some of you people are fast readers. I can’t even imagine myself finishing any book longer than your average Dr. Seuss in a day. Then again, I tend not to read for long periods of time (an hour at most), and I read at a snail’s pace. Probably because I’ve only got about 2 years of experience doing it. I average about 10 days for a 200 page book.
But some of the stuff in this thread, you people have talent.
I got the Glorious Appearing (the latest of the Left Behind series) from the library on Saturday afternoon, and finished it Sunday night. That was not reading straight thru, but about half the book Saturday, another quarter Sunday afternoon, and then the rest on Sunday night before I went to bed. Probably about three hours total. But the book is fluff.
I did George Eliot’s Middlemarch in a weekend when I was in college. I deliberately slowed down when I read Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, because I wanted the experience to last. Plus we were reading the book out loud to each other, and I didn’t want to get too far ahead.
My record is probably reading the Chronicles of Narnia in an evening. An old girlfriend gave me the series, but for some reason I never started it after dinner one day years later. I started the first, got hooked (to say the least) and finished the last of the seven books about 1:00 the next morning.
I got a C in my speed reading course in high school, even though I was the fastest reader in the course. They graded on how much you improved, and I was already doing everything they recommended.
Reading is what I do (usually) instead of watch TV. There are almost infinitely more good books than good TV shows.
Regards,
Shodan