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How long does it take to read Less Than Zero?

Bret Easton Ellis, Christian Rummel

Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis, Christian Rummel takes about 3 hours 49 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.

About 3 hours 49 minutes

A weekend read

First published 1985. 208 pages, about 57,200 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 21 minutes
Average, 250 words a minute 3 hours 49 minutes
Fast, 400 words a minute 2 hours 23 minutes

The page count is the median across 31 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.

About the book

Set in Los Angeles in the early 1980's, this coolly mesmerizing novel is a raw, powerful portrait of a lost generation who have experienced sex, drugs, and disaffection at too early an age, in a world shaped by casual nihilism, passivity, and too much money a place devoid of feeling or hope. Clay comes home for Christmas vacation from his Eastern college and re-enters a landscape of limitless privilege and absolute moral entropy, where everyone drives Porches, dines at Spago, and snorts mountains of cocaine. He tries to renew feelings for his girlfriend, Blair, and for his best friend from high school, Julian, who is careering into hustling and heroin. Clay's holiday turns into a dizzying spiral of desperation that takes him through the relentless parties in glitzy mansions, seedy bars, and underground rock clubs and also into the seamy world of L.A. after dark.

Subjects: Drug addiction, Fiction, Friendship, Generation X, Young men, Young men -- Fiction.

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