How long does it take to read The Secret Life of Bees?
by Sue Monk Kidd
6h 10m
92,400 words at 250 a minute
At 30 minutes a day, you would finish in about 13 days.
That is 12 sessions with The Secret Life of Bees.
45 minutes a day would finish it in about 9 days.
How we worked this out
The Secret Life of Bees is about 92,400 words, estimated from its 336 pages at about 275 words a page. At 250 words a minute, that comes to 6 hours 10 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 Secret Life of Bees, we will replace this estimate with the time they actually took.
The Secret Life of Bees at a glance
- Pages
- 336
- Author
- Sue Monk Kidd
- 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 The Secret Life of Bees alongside each other, one session at a time.
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