How long does it take to read Murder on the Orient Express?
by Agatha Christie
5h 54m
88,550 words at 250 a minute
At 30 minutes a day, you would finish in about 12 days.
That is 12 sessions with Murder on the Orient Express.
45 minutes a day would finish it in about 8 days.
How we worked this out
Murder on the Orient Express is about 88,550 words, estimated from its 322 pages at about 275 words a page. At 250 words a minute, that comes to 5 hours 54 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 Murder on the Orient Express, we will replace this estimate with the time they actually took.
Murder on the Orient Express at a glance
- Pages
- 322
- Author
- Agatha Christie
- Series
- Hercule Poirot, book 10
- Genre
- mystery, thriller, crime
Knowing the number is the easy part.
The hours are the hard part, and they are easier with company. ReadersGuild is where people read Murder on the Orient Express alongside each other, one session at a time.
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