How long does it take to read The Book Thief?
by Markus Zusak
10h 7m
151,800 words at 250 a minute
At 30 minutes a day, you would finish in about 3 weeks.
That is 20 sessions with The Book Thief.
45 minutes a day would finish it in about 2 weeks.
How we worked this out
The Book Thief is about 151,800 words, estimated from its 552 pages at about 275 words a page. At 250 words a minute, that comes to 10 hours 7 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 The Book Thief, we will replace this estimate with the time they actually took.
The Book Thief at a glance
- Pages
- 552
- Author
- Markus Zusak
- Genre
- fiction
Knowing the number is the easy part.
The hours are the hard part, and they are easier with company. ReadersGuild is where people read The Book Thief alongside each other, one session at a time.
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