How long does it take to read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks?
by Rebecca Skloot
6h 47m
101,750 words at 250 a minute
At 30 minutes a day, you would finish in about 2 weeks.
That is 14 sessions with The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.
45 minutes a day would finish it in about 10 days.
How we worked this out
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is about 101,750 words, estimated from its 370 pages at about 275 words a page. At 250 words a minute, that comes to 6 hours 47 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 Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, we will replace this estimate with the time they actually took.
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks at a glance
- Pages
- 370
- Author
- Rebecca Skloot
- Genre
- non-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 Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks alongside each other, one session at a time.
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