How long does it take to read Gilead?
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson takes about 4 hours 43 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 4 hours 43 minutes
A weekend read
First published 2004. 257 pages, about 70,675 words.
10 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 7 hours 51 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 4 hours 43 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 2 hours 57 minutes |
The page count is the median across 37 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
WINNER OF THE 2005 PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION In 1956, toward the end of Reverend John Ames’s life, he begins a letter to his young son, an account of himself and his forebears. Ames is the son of an Iowan preacher and the grandson of a minister who, as a young man in Maine, saw a vision of Christ bound in chains and came west to Kansas to fight for abolition: He “preached men into the Civil War,” then, at age fifty, became a chaplain in the Union Army, losing his right eye in battle. Reverend Ames writes to his son about the tension between his father—an ardent pacifist—and his grandfather, whose pistol and bloody shirts, concealed in an army blanket, may be relics from the fight between the abolitionists and those settlers who wanted to vote Kansas into the union as a slave state. And he tells a story of the sacred bonds between fathers and sons, which are tested in his tender and strained relationship with his namesake, John Ames Boughton, his best friend’s wayward son. Gilead is the long-hoped-for second novel by one of our finest writers, a hymn of praise and lamentation to the God-haunted existence that Reverend Ames loves passionately, and from which he will soon part.
Subjects: Reminiscing in old age, Fathers and sons, Fiction, Children of clergy, Grandfathers, Conflict of generations
