Twenty minutes a day.
That's all it takes for kids and adults alike to avoid a summer reading slump... and, as it turns out, to read some really amazing books. So, with our Summer Reading Challenge in full swing, we decided to do a little math.
Here’s our #Read20 breakdown:
- An average adult reader reads 200 words per minute. (Or take our speed-reading quiz and determine your own exact speed!)
- For argument’s sake, let’s say that children who read more slowly than adults can also read 200 wpm on a page with bigger type and shorter words.
- A book has about 200-250 words per page, depending on the font and size of the book. (This is just an average; go with us, here.)
- That averages out to about a page per minute.
- So, if you read 20 minutes a day for the rest of the summer—about six weeks—that’s 840 minutes and 840 pages.
Twenty minutes per day doesn’t sound like much… but 840 pages does.
Here’s what 840 pages gets you:
- Six 140-page books
- Three 280-page books
- Two 420-page books
- One really seriously long book
So, what does that mean in books?
Dozens upon dozens of picture books
Six Babysitter’s Club or Goosebumps books
Christmas in July! Holidays on Ice (166 pgs.) +A Christmas Carol (102 pgs.) +Hercule Poirot’s Christmas (272 pgs.) +You Better Not Cry (206 pgs.) +A Christmas Memory(107 pgs.)
David Sedaris’ best books: Me Talk Pretty One Day (272 pgs.) +Naked (291 pgs.) +Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim (257 pgs.)
Elena Ferrante’s childhood and adolescence (331 pgs.), her twenties (471 pgs.), and a few dozen pages into her middle age
Great new middle-grade fiction you may have missed: It Ain’t So Awful, Falafel(378 pgs.) +The Last Fifth Grade of Emerson Elementary (246 pgs.) +Far from Fair (229 pgs.)
Great new YA fiction you may have missed: The Serpent King (372 pgs.) +Drag Teen (261 pgs.) +The Smell of Other People's Houses (227 pgs.)
Anne of Green Gables(440 pgs.) +Anne of Avonlea (384 pgs.)
A Tale of Two Cities (470 pgs.) +Tales of the City (371 pgs.)
Moby-Dick(599 pgs.) +The Whale: A Love Story (281 pgs.)
A Murakami sampler: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (607 pgs.) + a little over 200 pages of his short stories
Ron Chernow’s Hamilton (818 pgs.) + the first couple chapters of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton: The Revolution
The entire first Game of Thronesbook (835 pgs.) + the first five pages of the sequel
78% of Infinite Jest (1,079 pgs.)
So, go forth and #Read20! You'll be surprised where you end up come September.
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