How long does it take to read English, August?
English, August by Upamanyu Chatterjee takes about 5 hours 20 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 5 hours 20 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1988. 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 9 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
Agastya Sen, known to friends by the English name August, is a child of the Indian elite. His friends go to Yale and Harvard. August himself has just landed a prize government job. The job takes him to Madna, “the hottest town in India,” deep in the sticks. There he finds himself surrounded by incompetents and cranks, time wasters, bureaucrats, and crazies. What to do? Get stoned, shirk work, collapse in the heat, stare at the ceiling. Dealing with the locals turns out to be a lot easier for August than living with himself. English, August is a comic masterpiece from contemporary India. Like A Confederacy of Dunces and The Catcher in the Rye, it is both an inspired and hilarious satire and a timeless story of self-discovery.
Subjects: Fiction, Young men, City and town life, Civil service, Indic fiction (English), India, fiction
