How long does it take to read Becoming?
by Michelle Obama
8h 13m
123,200 words at 250 a minute
At 30 minutes a day, you would finish in about 2 weeks.
That is 16 sessions with Becoming.
45 minutes a day would finish it in about 11 days.
How we worked this out
Becoming is about 123,200 words, estimated from its 448 pages at about 275 words a page. At 250 words a minute, that comes to 8 hours 13 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 Becoming, we will replace this estimate with the time they actually took.
Becoming at a glance
- Pages
- 448
- Author
- Michelle Obama
- Genre
- nonfiction
Knowing the number is the easy part.
The hours are the hard part, and they are easier with company. ReadersGuild is where people read Becoming alongside each other, one session at a time.
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