Chart: How Long It Takes To Read The Books You've Been Putting Off - Vox

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Chart: How long it takes to read the books you’ve been putting offby Brandon AmbrosinoSep 16, 2014, 2:20 PM UTC
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circa 1955: Young chimpanzee Kokomo Jnr sits in a chair wearing glasses and holding a comic book at his owner’s apartment in New York City.circa 1955: Young chimpanzee Kokomo Jnr sits in a chair wearing glasses and holding a comic book at his owner’s apartment in New York City.
circa 1955: Young chimpanzee Kokomo Jnr sits in a chair wearing glasses and holding a comic book at his owner’s apartment in New York City.
(Vecchio/Three Lions/Getty)

“I love reading, but there’s just no time!”

Chances are good you’ve heard this excuse or maybe even used it. It’s not a bad excuse, either: reading does take time, and sometimes, it takes lots of it. Unlike Twitter and Facebook, literature worth reading doesn’t offer quaint tl;dr summaries. It may be time to implement a strategy to help you get to those books you’ve been putting off for the past 17 years.

It might be good to start by planning out your reading by the length of time it will take you to finish a book. A nifty infographic from Personal Creations can help here. The website calculated the hours it takes for an average reader — which they define as reading 300 words per minute — to finish 64 of the world’s most popular books

Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well will take you just under two hours, which is about the length of a romcom you might watch on Netflix. The Great Gatsby and A Wrinkle in Time will both take you less than three hours. Some books, like Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, will require a slightly longer commitment (six hours), and some, like Gone With the Wind, will require almost an entire day to read.

Here’s the infographic to help you plan your literary schedule. Happy reading!

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How long to read books (Personal Creations)

(H/t Shortlist)

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