How long does it take to read Infinite Jest?
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace takes about 20 hours 14 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 20 hours 14 minutes
A long haul
First published 1996. 1,104 pages, about 303,600 words.
41 days (about 6 weeks) at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 33 hours 44 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 20 hours 14 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 12 hours 39 minutes |
The page count is the median across 24 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
A gargantuan, mind-altering comedy about the Pursuit of Happiness in America Set in an addicts' halfway house and a tennis academy, and featuring the most endearingly screwed-up family to come along in recent fiction, Infinite Jest explores essential questions about what entertainment is and why it has come to so dominate our lives; about how our desire for entertainment affects our need to connect with other people; and about what the pleasures we choose say about who we are. Equal parts philosophical quest and screwball comedy, Infinite Jest bends every rule of fiction without sacrificing for a moment its own entertainment value. It is an exuberant, uniquely American exploration of the passions that make us human - and one of those rare books that renew the idea of what a novel can do.
Subjects: Saddness, Compulsive behavior, Entertainment, Tennis, Addicts, Fiction
