How long does it take to read Infinite Jest?
by David Foster Wallace
20h 14m
303,600 words at 250 a minute
At 30 minutes a day, you would finish in about 6 weeks.
That is 40 sessions with Infinite Jest.
45 minutes a day would finish it in about 4 weeks.
How we worked this out
Infinite Jest is about 303,600 words, estimated from its 1,104 pages at about 275 words a page. At 250 words a minute, that comes to 20 hours 14 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 Infinite Jest, we will replace this estimate with the time they actually took.
Infinite Jest at a glance
- Pages
- 1,104
- Author
- David Foster Wallace
- Genre
- Literary 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 Infinite Jest alongside each other, one session at a time.
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