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How long does it take to read Head On?

A Novel of the Near Future (Lock in)

John Scalzi

Head On by John Scalzi takes about 6 hours 10 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.

About 6 hours 10 minutes

A weekend read

First published 2018. 336 pages, about 92,400 words.

13 days at 30 minutes a day

Estimate based on 275 words per page.

At other speeds

Slow, 150 words a minute 10 hours 16 minutes
Average, 250 words a minute 6 hours 10 minutes
Fast, 400 words a minute 3 hours 51 minutes

The page count is the median across 9 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.

About the book

Hilketa is a frenetic and violent pastime where players attack each other with swords and hammers. The main goal of the game: obtain your opponent's head and carry it through the goalposts. With flesh and bone bodies, a sport like this would be impossible. But all the players are "threeps," robot-like bodies controlled by people with Haden's Syndrome, so anything goes. No one gets hurt, but the brutality is real and the crowds love it.Until a star athlete drops dead on the playing field.Is it an accident or murder? FBI Agents and Haden-related crime investigators, Chris Shane and Leslie Vann, are called in to uncover the truth--and in doing so travel to the darker side of the fast-growing sport of Hilketa, where fortunes are made or lost, and where players and owners do whatever it takes to win, on and off the field.

Subjects: Epidemics, Virtual reality, Sports stories, Virus diseases, Fiction, Fiction, crime

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