How long does it take to read The Song of Achilles?
by Madeline Miller
7h 29m
112,200 words at 250 a minute
At 30 minutes a day, you would finish in about 2 weeks.
That is 15 sessions with The Song of Achilles.
45 minutes a day would finish it in about 10 days.
How we worked this out
The Song of Achilles is about 112,200 words, estimated from its 408 pages at about 275 words a page. At 250 words a minute, that comes to 7 hours 29 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 Song of Achilles, we will replace this estimate with the time they actually took.
The Song of Achilles at a glance
- Pages
- 408
- Author
- Madeline Miller
- Genre
- Historical 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 Song of Achilles alongside each other, one session at a time.
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