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How long does it take to read For the Time Being?

Annie Dillard, Tavia Gilbert

For the Time Being by Annie Dillard, Tavia Gilbert takes about 3 hours 46 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.

About 3 hours 46 minutes

A weekend read

First published 1999. 205 pages, about 56,375 words.

8 days at 30 minutes a day

Estimate based on 275 words per page.

At other speeds

Slow, 150 words a minute 6 hours 16 minutes
Average, 250 words a minute 3 hours 46 minutes
Fast, 400 words a minute 2 hours 21 minutes

The page count is the median across 13 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.

About the book

Following a novel, a memoir, and a book of poems, Annie Dillard returns to a form of nonfiction she has made her own--now, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.This personal narrative surveys the panorama of our world, past and present. Here is a natural history of sand, a catalogue of clouds, a batch of newborns on an obstetrical ward, a family of Mongol horsemen. Here is the story of Jesuit paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin digging in the deserts of China. Here is the story of Hasidic thought rising in Eastern Europe. Here are defect and beauty together, miracle and tragedy, time and eternity. Dillard poses questions about God, natural evil, and individual existence. Personal experience, science, and religion bear on a welter of fact. How can an individual matter? How might one live?Compassionate, informative, enthralling, always surprising, For the Time Being shows one of our most original writers--her breadth of knowledge matched by keen powers of observation, all of it informing her relentless curiosity--in the fullness of her powers.From the Hardcover edition.

Subjects: American essays, Essays, Good and evil, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Religious aspects

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