How long does it take to read A Garden of Earthly Delights?
A Garden of Earthly Delights by Joyce Carol Oates takes about 8 hours 4 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
Part of The Wonderland Quartet
Next: Expensive People
About 8 hours 4 minutes
A week or two of reading
First published 1967. 440 pages, about 121,000 words.
17 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 13 hours 27 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 8 hours 4 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 5 hours 3 minutes |
The page count is the median across 13 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
In A Garden of Earthly Delights, Oates presents one of her most memorable heroines, Clara Walpole, the beautiful daughter of Kentucky-born migrant farmworkers. Desperate to rise above her haphazard existence of violence and poverty, determined not to repeat her mother’s life, Clara struggles for independence by way of her relationships with four very different men: her father, a family man turned itinerant laborer, smoldering with resentment; the mysterious Lowry, who rescues Clara as a teenager and offers her the possibility of love; Revere, a wealthy landowner who provides Clara with stability; and Swan, Clara’s son, who bears the psychological and spiritual burden of his mother’s ambition. A Garden of Earthly Delights is the first novel in the Wonderland Quartet. Joyce Carol Oates’s Wonderland Quartet comprises four remarkable novels that explore social class in America and the inner lives of young Americans.
Subjects: Fiction, Mothers and sons, Illegitimate children, Fathers and daughters, Poor women, Children of migrant laborers
