Lord of the Rings - does it really take that long?

[janewilliams20]

Someone, somewhere, was saying it would take far too long to read, so as usual for me, I wondered, and wanted facts. A bit of Googling suggests it contaisn about 525,000 words. At 1000 words a minute, that's 525 minutes, or 8 3/4 hours. Get home at six, start reading, you'd put it down at about 3am. Better call it two evenings if you're being sensible. Quite big, but hardly a problem, surely? The run time of the film trilogy is 681 minutes, and that misses a lot.

Comments

[demoneyes.livejournal.com]

It was a long time ago now (i.e. sometime in my early teens!), but I'm fairly sure that it took me four weekday evenings to read the first time. But fitted around homework, dinner and a (parental mandatory) sensible bedtime that's probably not too far off your estimate.

I think my normal reading speed is around 90 pages/hour, which'd put LotR a bit over 11 hours - again, in the right ballpark.

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure what sort of criticism 'It takes a long time to read' is anyway - surely the question should be 'is it worth reading, irrespective of how long it takes?'

[janewilliams20.livejournal.com]

It was someone getting into writing fantasy, but didn't want to read any first. Didn't see why her writing should be limited just because she hasn't read things, she only has time to read so many over-sized classics...
aargh!

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

So...thier position is "I want to write this genre that I haven't read"? Blimey. Wish her the best of luck...

[janewilliams20.livejournal.com]

I did...