How long does it take to read Northern Lights?
by Philip Pullman
7h 19m
109,725 words at 250 a minute
At 30 minutes a day, you would finish in about 2 weeks.
That is 15 sessions with Northern Lights.
45 minutes a day would finish it in about 10 days.
How we worked this out
Northern Lights is about 109,725 words, estimated from its 399 pages at about 275 words a page. At 250 words a minute, that comes to 7 hours 19 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 Northern Lights, we will replace this estimate with the time they actually took.
Northern Lights at a glance
- Pages
- 399
- Author
- Philip Pullman
- Series
- His Dark Materials, book 1
- 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 Northern Lights alongside each other, one session at a time.
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