How long does it take to read The Giving Tree?
by Shel Silverstein
1h 10m
17,600 words at 250 a minute
At 30 minutes a day, you would finish in about 3 days.
That is 2 sessions with The Giving Tree.
45 minutes a day would finish it in about 2 days.
How we worked this out
The Giving Tree is about 17,600 words, estimated from its 64 pages at about 275 words a page. At 250 words a minute, that comes to 1 hour 10 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 Giving Tree, we will replace this estimate with the time they actually took.
The Giving Tree at a glance
- Pages
- 64
- Author
- Shel Silverstein
- Genre
- children
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 Giving Tree alongside each other, one session at a time.
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