Which Book Takes the Longest to Read?

Despite constant technological progress, print books still top the popularity charts. The unique feeling of turning pages and the smell of printing ink cannot be replaced by even the most perfect e-reader display. The numbers agree: in a 2021 Pew Research Center survey, 65% of American adults had read a print book in the past year, and 30% an e-book.

In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust. Guinness World Records lists it as the longest novel – the original contains an estimated 9,609,000 characters.

You will struggle for a good while with A Song of Ice and Fire, the saga behind the series Game of Thrones. The five volumes published so far run to roughly 1.7 million words – at 300 words a minute, that is about 98 hours of solid reading.

On average we can read about 240 words a minute when reading silently. Reading speed can be trained to some extent, but don’t expect miracles: according to research, the 1,000 words a minute promised by speed-reading courses always comes at the cost of comprehension. The most reliable way to get faster is simply to read a lot.

Don’t get your hopes up. You won’t succeed – not even if you read several times faster than everyone else. In 2010 Google counted almost 130 million different books in the world. Even if you got through each one in six hours and read eight hours a day, it would take more than 260,000 years. Not to mention that more and more keep coming all the time…

It depends how you ask. Time spent reading rises with age: in the US, people over 75 read for pleasure for an average of 40 minutes a day, teenagers for 13. In the European Union, however, more people under 30 (60%) than over 65 (47%) read at least one book a year. Either way, it’s time to think about how to bring children to a love of reading.

One of the most famous is Victor Hugo’s. In Les Misérables he managed to conjure up a sentence that runs to 823 words in the original. It is not the record, though: Molly Bloom’s closing monologue in Joyce’s Ulysses consists of sentences thousands of words long, and Bohumil Hrabal wrote Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age as one single sentence. Yum…

Every kind of book has its purpose. Non-fiction understandably broadens our outlook and knowledge. Fiction, on the other hand, according to some studies does a little more for our capacity for empathy, and for many of us it soothes the mind better.

If you are going to write a book, bet on romance and erotica. According to widely quoted estimates for the US market, the genre earned about $1.44 billion in 2012 – roughly twice as much as the next category. The same breakdown credits crime and mystery with $728 million, religious and inspirational books with $720 million, fantasy and science fiction with $590 million, and horror with $79 million.

In many ways, yes. Besides its obvious effect on our mental well-being and balance, reading is also linked to physical effects – a calmer heart rate, relaxed muscles, falling asleep more easily and lower stress levels. Most of these findings describe associations rather than guaranteed effects, but even so, this is just one of many reasons to reach for a book.