How long does it take to read The Silence of the Lambs?
by Thomas Harris
6h 12m
92,950 words at 250 a minute
At 30 minutes a day, you would finish in about 13 days.
That is 12 sessions with The Silence of the Lambs.
45 minutes a day would finish it in about 9 days.
How we worked this out
The Silence of the Lambs is about 92,950 words, estimated from its 338 pages at about 275 words a page. At 250 words a minute, that comes to 6 hours 12 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 Silence of the Lambs, we will replace this estimate with the time they actually took.
The Silence of the Lambs at a glance
- Pages
- 338
- Author
- Thomas Harris
- Series
- Hannibal Lecter, book 2
- 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 The Silence of the Lambs alongside each other, one session at a time.
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