How long does it take to read The Handmaid's Tale?
by Margaret Atwood
6h 4m
91,025 words at 250 a minute
At 30 minutes a day, you would finish in about 13 days.
That is 12 sessions with The Handmaid's Tale.
45 minutes a day would finish it in about 9 days.
How we worked this out
The Handmaid's Tale is about 91,025 words, estimated from its 331 pages at about 275 words a page. At 250 words a minute, that comes to 6 hours 4 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 Handmaid's Tale, we will replace this estimate with the time they actually took.
The Handmaid's Tale at a glance
- Pages
- 331
- Author
- Margaret Atwood
- 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 Handmaid's Tale alongside each other, one session at a time.
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