At One Place

How long does it take to read Ulysses?

How long to read Ulysses
about 19 hours
about 265,000 words

Ulysses is around 265,000 words, about nineteen hours at a standard reading rate — a figure that is almost meaningless in practice, because very little of the book is standard prose. The final chapter is eight sentences long across roughly 24,000 words with no punctuation. The whole novel covers a single day, 16 June 1904, so it takes about nineteen hours to read about eighteen hours of story, which is very nearly real time. The Jim Norton unabridged audiobook runs 27 hours 16 minutes.

The numbers

Total
18 hours 33 minutes
In hours
18.6 hours
Non-stop
0.8 days without sleeping
Covers
about 265,000 words
At a realistic pace
an hour a night
That works out as
about 19 days
As an audiobook
27 hours 16 minutes

What this assumes

About 265,000 words at 238 words per minute. The rate assumes non-technical linear prose, which Ulysses conspicuously is not.

Other books

What How long
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone about 5 hours 23 minutes
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix about 18 hours
The Hobbit about 6 hours 39 minutes
The Bible about 55 hours
War and Peace about 40 hours
Infinite Jest about 40 hours
Moby-Dick about 15 hours
Dune about 13 hours
Pride and Prejudice about 8 hours 33 minutes
Nineteen Eighty-Four about 6 hours 14 minutes
The Great Gatsby about 3 hours 18 minutes
Animal Farm about 2 hours 6 minutes
It about 31 hours
The complete works of Shakespeare about 59 hours
The complete Sherlock Holmes about 72 hours as an audiobook
All of English Wikipedia about 41 years

Common questions

How long does it take to read Ulysses?
about 19 hours — about 265,000 words.
What does that assume?
About 265,000 words at 238 words per minute. The rate assumes non-technical linear prose, which Ulysses conspicuously is not.
How long at a realistic pace?
an hour a night — about 19 days.

Related pages

Sources

  1. Calculated on this page — At One Place

How these figures are compiled and checked