How long does it take to read Anathem?
Anathem by Neal Stephenson takes about 17 hours 11 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 17 hours 11 minutes
A long haul
First published 2008. 937 pages, about 257,675 words.
35 days (about 5 weeks) at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 28 hours 38 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 17 hours 11 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 10 hours 44 minutes |
The page count is the median across 18 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
Anathem takes place on Arbre, a world where scholars long ago withdrew into walled monastic communities to shield their learning from a collapsing society. These cloistered thinkers, called avout, may not use most advanced machines, answer to an Inquisition, and can speak to outsiders only at fixed intervals of a year, decade, century or millennium. Fraa Erasmas, the narrator, lives in one such community. When his mentor spots a mysterious craft in orbit and is expelled for it, Erasmas is drawn into a growing crisis that pulls the cloisters and the secular government together, raising questions about quantum physics and philosophy.
This summary was written by AI and checked by a second AI model. How these are chosen.
Subjects: Monasteries, Philosophy, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Fiction, Science fiction, Life on other planets
