How long does it take to read John Adams?
by David McCullough
13h 46m
206,525 words at 250 a minute
At 30 minutes a day, you would finish in about 4 weeks.
That is 28 sessions with John Adams.
45 minutes a day would finish it in about 3 weeks.
How we worked this out
John Adams is about 206,525 words, estimated from its 751 pages at about 275 words a page. At 250 words a minute, that comes to 13 hours 46 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 John Adams, we will replace this estimate with the time they actually took.
John Adams at a glance
- Pages
- 751
- Author
- David McCullough
- Genre
- history, historical fiction, biography
Knowing the number is the easy part.
The hours are the hard part, and they are easier with company. ReadersGuild is where people read John Adams alongside each other, one session at a time.
See who is reading right now