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READING TIME · ERNEST HEMINGWAY · 1926

How long does it take to read The Sun Also Rises?

At an average reading speed, about 4 hours 20 minutes. The Sun Also Rises is 67,740 words long, in 19 chapters in three books.

WORDS
67,740
BOOKS
3
READING LEVEL
About grade 3 (Flesch–Kincaid)

Reading time at different speeds

ReaderSpeedWhole book
Unhurried200 words a minute5 h 40 min
Average adult reader260 words a minute4 h 20 min
Quick reader320 words a minute3 h 30 min

To finish it at a steady pace:

How many chapters are in The Sun Also Rises?

The Sun Also Rises has 19 chapters in three books. Parlor opens it a book at a time, so the times below are for each book. The longest is Book 2 (44,586 words, 2 h 51 min); the shortest is Book 3 (6,336 words, 24 min). The average book takes 1 h 27 min.

Reading times below are at 260 words a minute.

BookWordsReading time
Book 116,8181 h 5 minCheck it →
Book 244,5862 h 51 minCheck it →
Book 36,33624 minCheck it →

READING IT FOR CLASS?

Knowing how long it takes is one thing. Understanding it is another.

Parlor Study is a reading comprehension companion. Read The Sun Also Rises one book at a time, then make sure you understood it.

  1. Read a book. The full Project Gutenberg text, with highlights, notes and read-aloud.
  2. Explain it in your own words. Challenge me asks about the main idea, what the text suggests without saying, and the turn the book hinges on, then checks your answer against the text.
  3. Talk it through, then come back. Discuss stays within the books you have reached, so it won’t give away what comes next, and Revisit brings your ideas back later.
Open The Sun Also Rises in Parlor →How Parlor practices reading comprehension

Parlor Study is a web preview for ages 13 and up, available by invitation. Request an invitation. AI feedback can make mistakes; check it against the text.

How these numbers were worked out

Words are counted in The Sun Also Rises, Project Gutenberg eBook #67138, the edition Parlor opens, divided into books exactly as Parlor shows them. Project Gutenberg’s licence and notes are left out. Other editions may differ slightly.

Reading speeds follow Marc Brysbaert’s review of 190 studies, which found that adults read English silently at about 260 words a minute for fiction and 238 for non-fiction (Journal of Memory and Language, 2019). Older and more difficult books often take longer than their word count suggests.

The reading level is the Flesch–Kincaid grade, worked out from average sentence length (8.7 words) and word length. It measures how long the sentences and words are, not how hard the ideas are.

Similar length

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