How long does it take to read Looking for Alaska?
by John Green
4h 3m
60,775 words at 250 a minute
At 30 minutes a day, you would finish in about 9 days.
That is 8 sessions with Looking for Alaska.
45 minutes a day would finish it in about 6 days.
How we worked this out
Looking for Alaska is about 60,775 words, estimated from its 221 pages at about 275 words a page. At 250 words a minute, that comes to 4 hours 3 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 Looking for Alaska, we will replace this estimate with the time they actually took.
Looking for Alaska at a glance
- Pages
- 221
- Author
- John Green
- Genre
- young-adult
Knowing the number is the easy part.
The hours are the hard part, and they are easier with company. ReadersGuild is where people read Looking for Alaska alongside each other, one session at a time.
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