How long does it take to read Dark Places?
by Gillian Flynn
6h 24m
95,975 words at 250 a minute
At 30 minutes a day, you would finish in about 13 days.
That is 13 sessions with Dark Places.
45 minutes a day would finish it in about 9 days.
How we worked this out
Dark Places is about 95,975 words, estimated from its 349 pages at about 275 words a page. At 250 words a minute, that comes to 6 hours 24 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 Dark Places, we will replace this estimate with the time they actually took.
Dark Places at a glance
- Pages
- 349
- Author
- Gillian Flynn
- Genre
- mystery, thriller, crime
Knowing the number is the easy part.
The hours are the hard part, and they are easier with company. ReadersGuild is where people read Dark Places alongside each other, one session at a time.
See who is reading right now