How long does it take to read Appointment in Samarra?
Appointment in Samarra by John O'Hara takes about 5 hours 31 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 5 hours 31 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1934. 301 pages, about 82,775 words.
12 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 9 hours 12 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 5 hours 31 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 3 hours 27 minutes |
The page count is the median across 35 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
O’Hara did for fictional Gibbsville, Pennsylvania what Faulkner did for Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi: surveyed its social life and drew its psychic outlines, but he did it in utterly worldly terms, without Faulkner’s taste for mythic inference or the basso profundo of his prose. Julian English is a man who squanders what fate gave him. He lives on the right side of the tracks, with a country club membership and a wife who loves him. His decline and fall, over the course of just 72 hours around Christmas, is a matter of too much spending, too much liquor, and a couple of reckless gestures. That his calamity is petty and preventable only makes it more powerful. In Faulkner, the tragedies all seem to be taking place on Olympus, even when they’re happening among the low-lifes. In O’Hara, they could be happening to you.
Subjects: Ethnic relations, Fiction, Marriage, Married people, Self-destructive behavior, Social life and customs
