The Complete Stories by Clarice Lispector: 11 hours and 31 minutes

August 2, 2024 4:20 AM

"How Long to Read is a book search engine that helps you find out how long it will take to read books and provide reading time data that is tailored to you. With our simple WPM (words per minute) test you can find out how long it will take you to read almost anything, and also use our search engine to find books that will fit the time you have to read."

I found my way to How Long to Read via a recent Economist article about how long it would take to read "the greatest books of all time." The question of which are "the greatest books of all time," ever a popular and uncontroversial question, can be explored at... The Greatest Books of All Time.

(For that last link, I urge bookish MeFites to spend a minute with the site. It has some useful-to-readers features that I don't think I've previously seen amalgamated in one place, or at least, amalgamated in a cleanly laid out and easily searchable fashion.)

posted by cupcakeninja (23 comments total)

Interesting idea. The "time to read" seems to be solely based on word count and doesn't take into account writing style. That leads to odd results, like the claim that it takes less time to read One Hundred Years of Solitude than to read The Da Vinci Code. But so long as you take its results with a grain of salt, it could be a useful tool.
posted by Johnny Assay at 4:31 AM on August 2 [10 favorites]

This strikes me as a bit of a strange measure. My reading is broken-up into regular daily, or semi-daily, spurts. As such, the total time to read a particular book is pretty irrelevant. I take whatever time it takes to finish a book, then I move on to the next book, whenever that may be. Reading is an open-ended activity, unconcerned with whether a book might take three cumulative hours or four. It’s a leisurely walk, not a race. YMMV, of course.
posted by Thorzdad at 4:54 AM on August 2 [8 favorites]

ah yes the classic 'Barbershop Appointment Book: 8.5 x 11 inch 393 page blank date 7 AM to 3:45 AM one day one page 15 minute increments 21 hour day' by eMpTi Art Planners that takes exactly 5 hours and 1 minute to read.
posted by logicpunk at 5:01 AM on August 2 [5 favorites]

logicpunk, I encountered some of those, too, and I thought about techbros, ai, solutions looking for problems, etc. :-D Still, when I went looking for known items that I had a feel for reading time of, some of the answers seemed reasonable...
posted by cupcakeninja at 5:06 AM on August 2

I'm a speed reader, so this thing probably can't match what I do...I'm always surprised at reading estimators on websites telling me how long it will take to read an article.
posted by jenfullmoon at 5:14 AM on August 2 [2 favorites]

Nice, thanks. But really I came here to swoon over the fact that you mention Clarice Lispector in your title. *fanboy sigh*
posted by Rykey at 5:22 AM on August 2 [7 favorites]

really I came here to swoon over the fact that you mention Clarice Lispector in your title
same *blushes*
posted by HearHere at 5:26 AM on August 2 [4 favorites]

Not going to lie, folks, I did think carefully about the best MeFite bait when selecting that title.
posted by cupcakeninja at 5:31 AM on August 2 [4 favorites]

I could have used this before I tried reading 2666. According to this, I should have expected it to take about 200 hours.
posted by pattern juggler at 5:59 AM on August 2 [2 favorites]

‘Time till the book is cast aside in a spasm of loathing and weltschmerz’ would have been a useful metric for me once or twice
posted by Phanx at 6:13 AM on August 2 [7 favorites]

I just started rereading James Salter's "A Sport and a Pastime" (the 716th greatest book of all time) which the site says will take me three and a half hours. Let's see!
posted by chavenet at 6:16 AM on August 2 [1 favorite]

Now you know you ain't gonna be reading Clarice Lispector at the same rate as other authors. Is there some kind of Lispector multiplier variable you can add to this calculation?
posted by lefty lucky cat at 6:46 AM on August 2 [3 favorites]

I just started rereading James Salter's "A Sport and a Pastime" (the 716th greatest book of all time) which the site says will take me three and a half hours. Let's see!

I literally read that this past May while sitting on a beach under a blue umbrella in a wooden and canvas beach chair. That feels, intellectually, about right, even with occasional "dunk in ocean" breaks and the fact that about 1.5 hours in my mother brought me a 4pm insulated cup full of Gunpowder gin and tonic (heavy on ice and limes) which might have slowed me down a bit. Good book, though I think Light Years is my favorite Salter.

I don't know that I've ever thought about how long it takes to read a book, thought I know I read pretty quickly. I read mostly literary fiction and some non-fiction (mainly history, theory, and political stuff). I can tell you an average week at the beach, in which I have little else to do save eat, sleep, go on long walks/runs, and hang out, I usually get through 7-10 books. It's not so much about how long it takes to finish a novel as much as how much time everything else takes, including writing, which is both what I do for work and (at least theoretically) what I do for doing. I used to read in all the moments that I scroll through my cell phone and I've started trying to do that again because the internet is not really bringing me much joy or discovery anymore.

It's easier to tell you that I read at least a book a week, even when it's busy. I don't suppose I've ever really thought about how long or short it is. Sometimes I deliberately try to slow myself down when I really like a book because I don't want it to end.

Post title also got me. I'm a sucker for Clarice Lispector.
posted by thivaia at 6:58 AM on August 2 [2 favorites]

You know what's a fast read, though, and an absolute GOAT: The Hearing Trumpet

Also, I made it over a hundred on that Greatest Books of All Time List and was aggrieved that I did not find a single title by Flann O'Brien. Somebody is not having enough fun reading, I guess.
posted by thivaia at 7:06 AM on August 2 [3 favorites]

Looking at the books it's randomly highlighting on the front of the site, I just read RF Kuang's Babel last month and I am pretty sure I did not take anywhere near the ten hours this site thinks it would take.

Then I looked at books sitting out on the mantlepiece and decided to see what it thinks of Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions and god I sure have taken longer than three hours on that thing. Slogging through all those lengthy introductions is exhausting. Plus I also put it down after the story that's a three-page trans panic joke by an advertising executive who is Harlan's Best Buddy Ever and might not ever finish it. Time to read: ∞.

I don't think I want to take their reading speed test. I feel like I'd turn it into a race. But I do see the use for this sort of data; if you get a physical book, there's a lot of data to use to estimate how long it'll take - how thick? how large is the type? how much book is still there after reading for a while? - that's not there when it's just a tiny cover thumbnail in your e-reader app. It would be real nice if those apps had things like the word-count.
posted by egypturnash at 7:22 AM on August 2 [2 favorites]

I was curious about the speed test, and I don't know if the text changes each time, but I don't think a passage from 1984 that is half words that don't exist like NEWSPEAK and CRIMESTOP is actually a terribly good measure of how quickly I read things.
posted by jacquilynne at 8:34 AM on August 2 [1 favorite]

I've found this site to be really helpful even if not always accurate. It's really more for ebooks I would imagine, that's what I use it for anyway. I speed read so I did the speed test and got more accurate results.

It personally annoys me to no end that I can't sort Libby results by number of pages. Goodreads isn't any better because half the time the page count is wrong. I think audiobooks should be able to be sorted by hour length - but, nope, they're not. Can't go by file size - sometimes long books are better compressed, short books have images, etc.

If I want something I can finish by dinner - pop the title in here and see if my choice seems doable. If I want to spend a rainy weekend immersing myself in something - check it here and see if it's something that's gonna give me a weekend full of text. If I want to hit my goal of number of books for the week and I know I'm swamped at work - which ones seem doable that I'm interested in right now? This sounds like it might be something I could enjoy but I'm not convinced - oh it would only take me an hour to read, I'll give it a shot. And so on.

I actually hate having to jump in and out of a fiction book, only reading paragraphs or pages here or there. If I sit down to read a book, I usually want to finish the book. This helps me know how likely that is.
posted by Saucy Possum at 8:54 AM on August 2 [1 favorite]

This is failing to factor in how long it takes to start reading a book, or how life-distractions get in the way.

I've been wanting to read One Hundred Years Of Solitude for about two and a half decades. I see that my current copy of the book (receipt/bookmark still on page 10) dates to 2017. Why stop? No reason! No reason! I've heard nothing but good things! I seem to recall I was enjoying reading it.

I'll be taking it to the beach this weekend, see if I can get done in 2.5 decades, 7 hours and 40 minutes.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 11:18 AM on August 2 [5 favorites]

Okay, I misread how the speed reading test went, as it made it look like you had to have it calculated via your Goodreads page (I hate Goodreads so never mind this) and really, you have to look for a book and then do the reading speed test there. I did a search on one of the books I'm reading now (Blitz by Daniel O'Malley, about 500 pages) and I...read 413 words in 26.02 seconds, 953 words per minute. It said it will take me 2 hours, 35 minutes to read it.

I note that the book is freaking huge, so I can't carry it around in my purse and thus...am taking longer than that to read it, pretty much reading it while I'm somewhere stationary :P I remember I read about 100 pages/hour when trying to speed read Harry Potter books after midnight release parties before everyone else woke up, so I don't know if this is terribly accurate.

I will note that the supplied text for the test was pretty effing weird, even for the likes of me, so I'd imagine others may have issues with it. (Example: " The second showcase – by César, likewise of the Bahnhofstrasse – preferred to cater for the Arab taste with a tableau of lusciously embroidered gowns and diamanté turbans and jewelled wristwatches at sixty thousand francs a shot.")
posted by jenfullmoon at 11:36 AM on August 2

282 but I had to force myself to slow down.
posted by Faintdreams at 12:16 PM on August 2

I was curious about the speed test, and I don't know if the text changes each time, but I don't think a passage from 1984 that is half words that don't exist like NEWSPEAK and CRIMESTOP is actually a terribly good measure of how quickly I read things.

jacquilynne: There are definitely multiple possible samples, i just poked at it several times in a row out of curiosity. Seems to pull a similarly-sized snippet from the beginning of a random famous-ish book. I got the 1984 one, but i also got Gatsby and a couple books i'm not familiar with.

(I don't think the test is very good from a UX perspective, tbh, because you can see the text before you click the "Start Timer" button. It should probably be hidden until you click the clicky thing. Not least because if you misclick, you can end up reading the whole sample without timing yourself.)
posted by adrienneleigh at 2:35 PM on August 2 [2 favorites]

Yeah, it's an odd test too because it's so brief. Give me a couple of pages instead--long enough that I look at my phone, or check work email, or pet the dog, or one of the million other distractions that are the real governors of my reading speed. The test said I read something like 430 words a minute and it's like I'm sorry but you know nothing about me.

It's kinda neat watching people talk about how they pick the next book to read, though. My reading is so amorphous, especially lately, when I can hardly finish a book. I keep reading first or second chapters, or if it's a collection, an essay or two, a story or two, and can't get any further, and never know what to try next. So I like hearing about how people choose their books.
posted by mittens at 3:32 PM on August 2 [1 favorite]

mittens: i've been doing it by deciding that i need to know the whole history of a genre, lolsob. I got super into Golden Age/midcentury detective fiction about a year ago, and have been reading by tracing out the connections between authors (seriously, every British mystery writer in the 1930s knew each other and put silly references to each other in their books) and tropes. It's kind of convenient because if i bounce off an author there's always another one in the same larger project for me to pick up and try.
posted by adrienneleigh at 4:29 PM on August 2 [4 favorites]