How long does it take to read The Help?
by Kathryn Stockett
8h 8m
122,100 words at 250 a minute
At 30 minutes a day, you would finish in about 2 weeks.
That is 16 sessions with The Help.
45 minutes a day would finish it in about 11 days.
How we worked this out
The Help is about 122,100 words, estimated from its 444 pages at about 275 words a page. At 250 words a minute, that comes to 8 hours 8 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 Help, we will replace this estimate with the time they actually took.
The Help at a glance
- Pages
- 444
- Author
- Kathryn Stockett
- 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 Help alongside each other, one session at a time.
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