How long does it take to read City of Bones?
by Cassandra Clare
8h 54m
133,375 words at 250 a minute
At 30 minutes a day, you would finish in about 3 weeks.
That is 18 sessions with City of Bones.
45 minutes a day would finish it in about 12 days.
How we worked this out
City of Bones is about 133,375 words, estimated from its 485 pages at about 275 words a page. At 250 words a minute, that comes to 8 hours 54 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 City of Bones, we will replace this estimate with the time they actually took.
City of Bones at a glance
- Pages
- 485
- Author
- Cassandra Clare
- Series
- The Mortal Instruments, book 1
- Genre
- young-adult
Knowing the number is the easy part.
The hours are the hard part, and they are easier with company. ReadersGuild is where people read City of Bones alongside each other, one session at a time.
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