How long does it take to read A Mouthful of Air?
A Mouthful of Air by Anthony Burgess takes about 6 hours 45 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 6 hours 45 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1992. 368 pages, about 101,200 words.
14 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 11 hours 15 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 6 hours 45 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 4 hours 13 minutes |
The page count is the median across 10 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
Yeats once wrote of a poem, saying he had made it out of a mouthful of air. Burgess advances this point by presenting a fascinating survey of language--how it operates, and how it will develop in the future--that ranges from Shakespearean pronunciation to the place of English in the world family of languages.
