ShelfLook
Tools About
Cover of Lullaby

How long does it take to read Lullaby?

Chuck Palahniuk

Lullaby by Chuck Palahniuk takes about 4 hours 50 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.

About 4 hours 50 minutes

A weekend read

First published 2002. 264 pages, about 72,600 words.

10 days at 30 minutes a day

Estimate based on 275 words per page.

At other speeds

Slow, 150 words a minute 8 hours 4 minutes
Average, 250 words a minute 4 hours 50 minutes
Fast, 400 words a minute 3 hours 2 minutes

The page count is the median across 25 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.

About the book

"Carl Streator is a solitary widower and fortyish newspaper reporter who is assigned to do a series of articles on Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. In the course of this investigation, he discovers an ominous thread: the presence on the scenes of these deaths of the anthology Poems and Rhymes Around the World, opened to the page where there appears an African chant or "culling song." This song turns out to be lethal when spoken or even thought in anyone's direction - and once it lodges in Streator's brain, he finds himself becoming an involuntary serial killer. So he teams up with a real estate broker, one Helen Hoover Boyle, who specializes in selling haunted (or "distressed") houses (wonderfully high turnover), and who lost a child to the culling song years before. Together they set out on a cross-country odyssey. Their goal is to remove all copies of the book from libraries, lest this deadly verbal virus spread and wipe out human life. Accompanying them on their road trip are Helen's assistant, Mona Sabbat, an exquisitely earnest Wiccan, and her sardonic ecoterrorist boyfriend, Oyster, who is running a scam involving fake liability claims and business blackmail. Welcome to the new nuclear family."--BOOK JACKET.

Subjects: Sudden infant death syndrome, Death, Journalists, Charms, Fiction, Incantations

More by Chuck Palahniuk

Books like this

Popular books of similar length