How long does it take to read Norwegian Wood?
by Haruki Murakami
5h 26m
81,400 words at 250 a minute
At 30 minutes a day, you would finish in about 11 days.
That is 11 sessions with Norwegian Wood.
45 minutes a day would finish it in about 8 days.
How we worked this out
Norwegian Wood is about 81,400 words, estimated from its 296 pages at about 275 words a page. At 250 words a minute, that comes to 5 hours 26 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 Norwegian Wood, we will replace this estimate with the time they actually took.
Norwegian Wood at a glance
- Pages
- 296
- Author
- Haruki Murakami
- Series
- noruueinoSen
- Genre
- fiction
Knowing the number is the easy part.
The hours are the hard part, and they are easier with company. ReadersGuild is where people read Norwegian Wood alongside each other, one session at a time.
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