How long does it take to read Slaughterhouse-Five?
by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
5h 3m
75,625 words at 250 a minute
At 30 minutes a day, you would finish in about 11 days.
That is 10 sessions with Slaughterhouse-Five.
45 minutes a day would finish it in about 7 days.
How we worked this out
Slaughterhouse-Five is about 75,625 words, estimated from its 275 pages at about 275 words a page. At 250 words a minute, that comes to 5 hours 3 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 Slaughterhouse-Five, we will replace this estimate with the time they actually took.
Slaughterhouse-Five at a glance
- Pages
- 275
- Author
- Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
- 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 Slaughterhouse-Five alongside each other, one session at a time.
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