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How long does it take to read Ball Lightning?

Cixin Liu

Ball Lightning by Cixin Liu takes about 7 hours 46 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.

About 7 hours 46 minutes

A weekend read

First published 2009. 424 pages, about 116,600 words.

16 days at 30 minutes a day

Estimate based on 275 words per page.

At other speeds

Slow, 150 words a minute 12 hours 57 minutes
Average, 250 words a minute 7 hours 46 minutes
Fast, 400 words a minute 4 hours 52 minutes

The page count is the median across 18 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.

About the book

When Chen's parents are incinerated before his eyes by a blast of ball lightning, he devotes his life to cracking the secret of this mysterious natural phenomenon. His search takes him to stormy mountaintops, an experimental military weapons lab, and an old Soviet science station. The more he learns, the more he comes to realize that ball lightning is just the tip of an entirely new frontier. While Chen's quest for answers gives purpose to his lonely life, it also pits him against soldiers and scientists with motives of their own: a beautiful army major with an obsession with dangerous weaponry, and a physicist who has no place for ethical considerations in his single-minded pursuit of knowledge.

Subjects: Fiction, science fiction, general, Physicists, Fiction, Ball lightning, Military weapons, Imaginary wars and battles

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