How long does it take to read Infinite Jest?
by David Foster Wallace
Checked July 2026
19h 57m
299,200 words at 250 a minute
At 30 minutes a day, you would finish in about 6 weeks.
That is 40 sessions with Infinite Jest.
Read it with the Guild45 minutes a day would finish it in about 4 weeks.
How many words is Infinite Jest?
Infinite Jest is about 299,200 words, estimated from its 1,088 pages at about 275 words a page. At 250 words a minute, that comes to 19 hours 57 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 Infinite Jest, we will replace this estimate with the time they actually took.
How many pages is Infinite Jest?
- Pages
- 1,088
- Author
- David Foster Wallace
- Genre
- fiction
Read it with the Guild
Read Infinite Jest at a fire.
ReadersGuild opens soon. You have the hours. The hard part is sitting down for them. Open a fire and up to twenty readers sit with you, each with their own book, and nobody has to remember to log it afterwards.
“I built this once before. People kept their books in it, their sessions, their whole year, and I shut it down. This is me building it again properly, and everyone who was on the first one comes back as an Elder.”
One person, in San Francisco. iOS first, Android on the way.