Cover of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Reading time

How long does it take to read The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle?

by Haruki Murakami

At an average pace

11h 8m

166,925 words at 250 a minute

At 30 minutes a day, you would finish in about 3 weeks.

That is 22 sessions with The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.

How fast do you read?
30

45 minutes a day would finish it in about 2 weeks.

How we worked this out

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is about 166,925 words, estimated from its 607 pages at about 275 words a page. At 250 words a minute, that comes to 11 hours 8 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 Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, we will replace this estimate with the time they actually took.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle at a glance

Pages
607
Author
Haruki Murakami
Series
nezimakiNiao kuronikuru
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 Wind-Up Bird Chronicle alongside each other, one session at a time.

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