How long does it take to read The Martian?
by Andy Weir
6h 46m
101,475 words at 250 a minute
At 30 minutes a day, you would finish in about 2 weeks.
That is 14 sessions with The Martian.
45 minutes a day would finish it in about 10 days.
How we worked this out
The Martian is about 101,475 words, estimated from its 369 pages at about 275 words a page. At 250 words a minute, that comes to 6 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 The Martian, we will replace this estimate with the time they actually took.
The Martian at a glance
- Pages
- 369
- Author
- Andy Weir
- Series
- The Martian
- Genre
- fantasy, paranormal
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 Martian alongside each other, one session at a time.
See who is reading right now