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How long does it take to read Comfort & Joy?

a novel

Jim Grimsley

Comfort & Joy by Jim Grimsley takes about 5 hours 20 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.

About 5 hours 20 minutes

A weekend read

First published 1999. 291 pages, about 80,025 words.

11 days at 30 minutes a day

Estimate based on 275 words per page.

At other speeds

Slow, 150 words a minute 8 hours 54 minutes
Average, 250 words a minute 5 hours 20 minutes
Fast, 400 words a minute 3 hours 20 minutes

The page count is the median across 3 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.

About the book

Ford McKinney leads a charmed life: he's a young doctor possessing good looks, good breeding, and money. He comes from an old Savannah family where his parents, attentive to his future, focus their energies on finding their son--their golden boy--a girl to marry. But how charmed is this life when Ford's own heart suspects that he is not meant to spend his life with a woman? His suspicions are confirmed when he meets Dan Crell. Dan is a quiet man with a great voice. Behind the tempered facade of the shy hospital administrator is a singer who can transform a room with his soaring voice, leaving his listeners in awe and reverence. Ford catches one such Christmas concert and his life is never quite the same; he is touched in a place he keeps hidden, forbidden. When Ford and Dan begin to explore the limits of their relationship, Dan's own secrets are exposed--and his mysterious and painful childhood returns to haunt him. In Comfort and Joy Jim Grimsley finds a marriage between the stark and stunning pain of his prize-winning Winter Birds and the passion of critically acclaimed Dream Boy. In this, his fourth novel, he considers pressing questions. How does a man reconcile the child he was raised to be with the man that he truly is? What happens when an adult has to choose between his parents and a lover?

Subjects: Attitudes, Christmas, Coming out (Sexual orientation), Fiction, Gay men, HIV-positive gay men

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