Cover of The Night Circus
Reading time

How long does it take to read The Night Circus?

by Erin Morgenstern

At an average pace

7h 20m

110,000 words at 250 a minute

At 30 minutes a day, you would finish in about 2 weeks.

That is 15 sessions with The Night Circus.

How fast do you read?
30

45 minutes a day would finish it in about 10 days.

How we worked this out

The Night Circus is about 110,000 words, estimated from its 400 pages at about 275 words a page. At 250 words a minute, that comes to 7 hours 20 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 Night Circus, we will replace this estimate with the time they actually took.

The Night Circus at a glance

Pages
400
Author
Erin Morgenstern
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 Night Circus alongside each other, one session at a time.

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