How long does it take to read A Tale of Two Cities?
by Charles Dickens
8h 58m
134,475 words at 250 a minute
At 30 minutes a day, you would finish in about 3 weeks.
That is 18 sessions with A Tale of Two Cities.
45 minutes a day would finish it in about 12 days.
How we worked this out
A Tale of Two Cities is about 134,475 words, estimated from its 489 pages at about 275 words a page. At 250 words a minute, that comes to 8 hours 58 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 A Tale of Two Cities, we will replace this estimate with the time they actually took.
A Tale of Two Cities at a glance
- Pages
- 489
- Author
- Charles Dickens
- 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 A Tale of Two Cities alongside each other, one session at a time.
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