How long does it take to read A Grief Observed?
A Grief Observed by C. S. Lewis takes about 1 hour 15 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 1 hour 15 minutes
An evening's read
First published 1961. 68 pages, about 18,700 words.
3 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 2 hours 5 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 1 hour 15 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 47 minutes |
The page count is the median across 44 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
Written after his wife's tragic death as a way of surviving the "mad midnight moment," A Grief Observed is C.S. Lewis's honest reflection on the fundamental issues of life, death, and faith in the midst of loss. This work contains his concise, genuine reflections on that period: "Nothing will shake a man -- or at any rate a man like me -- out of his merely verbal thinking and his merely notional beliefs. He has to be knocked silly before he comes to his senses. Only torture will bring out the truth. Only under torture does he discover it himself." This is a beautiful and unflinchingly homest record of how even a stalwart believer can lose all sense of meaning in the universe, and how he can gradually regain his bearings.
Subjects: Death, Meditations, Bereavement, Christianity, Grief, Religion
