How long does it take to read American Gods?
by Neil Gaiman
11h 39m
174,625 words at 250 a minute
At 30 minutes a day, you would finish in about 3 weeks.
That is 23 sessions with American Gods.
45 minutes a day would finish it in about 2 weeks.
How we worked this out
American Gods is about 174,625 words, estimated from its 635 pages at about 275 words a page. At 250 words a minute, that comes to 11 hours 39 minutes.
Most reading-time sites default to 300 words a minute. The best evidence we could find, a 2019 meta-analysis of 190 studies by Marc Brysbaert, puts silent adult reading of English prose closer to 238 words a minute for non-fiction and 260 for fiction. We use 250. It is slower than the number you will see elsewhere, and it is closer to how people actually read.
This is still a model, not a measurement. When enough ReadersGuild readers have finished American Gods, we will replace this estimate with the time they actually took.
American Gods at a glance
- Pages
- 635
- Author
- Neil Gaiman
- Series
- American Gods, book 1
- Genre
- fantasy, paranormal
Knowing the number is the easy part.
The hours are the hard part, and they are easier with company. ReadersGuild is where people read American Gods alongside each other, one session at a time.
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