How long does it take to read Life of Pi?
by Yann Martel
8h 26m
126,500 words at 250 a minute
At 30 minutes a day, you would finish in about 2 weeks.
That is 17 sessions with Life of Pi.
45 minutes a day would finish it in about 12 days.
How we worked this out
Life of Pi is about 126,500 words, estimated from its 460 pages at about 275 words a page. At 250 words a minute, that comes to 8 hours 26 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 Life of Pi, we will replace this estimate with the time they actually took.
Life of Pi at a glance
- Pages
- 460
- Author
- Yann Martel
- 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 Life of Pi alongside each other, one session at a time.
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