How long does it take to read A House in the Sky?
A House in the Sky by Amanda Lindhout takes about 11 hours 57 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 11 hours 57 minutes
A week or two of reading
First published 2013. 652 pages, about 179,300 words.
24 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 19 hours 55 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 11 hours 57 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 7 hours 28 minutes |
The page count is the median across 2 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
As a child, Amanda Lindhout escaped a violent household by paging through issues of National Geographic and imagining herself in its exotic locales. At the age of nineteen, working as a cocktail waitress in Calgary, Alberta, she began saving her tips so she could travel the globe. Aspiring to understand the world and live a significant life, she backpacked through Latin America, Laos, Bangladesh, and India, and emboldened by each adventure, went on to Sudan, Syria, and Pakistan. In war-ridden Afghanistan and Iraq she carved out a fledgling career as a television reporter. And then, in August 2008, she traveled to Somalia -- "the most dangerous place on earth." On her fourth day, she was abducted by a group of masked men along a dusty road. Held hostage for 460 days, Amanda converts to Islam as a survival tactic, receives "wife lessons" from one of her captors, and risks a daring escape. Moved between a series of abandoned houses in the desert, she survives on memory -- every lush detail of the world she experienced in her life before captivity -- and on strategy, fortitude, and hope. Kept in chains, starved and abused, she survives by imagining herself in a "house in the sky," finding strength and hope in the power of her own mind.
Subjects: Biography, Journalists, Hostages, History, Journalists, biography, Kidnapping
