How long does it take to read Motherless Brooklyn?
Jonathan Lethem, J. Lethem, Professor of the History of Science Geoffrey Cantor
Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem, J. Lethem, Professor of the History of Science Geoffrey Cantor takes about 5 hours 48 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 5 hours 48 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1999. 316 pages, about 86,900 words.
12 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 9 hours 39 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 5 hours 48 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 3 hours 37 minutes |
The page count is the median across 17 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
From Amazon: Brooklyn's very own self-appointed Human Freakshow, Lionel Essrog is an orphan whose Tourettic impulses drive him to bark, count, and rip apart our language in startling and original ways. Together with three veterans of the St. Vincent's Home for Boys, he works for small-time mobster Frank Minna's limo service cum detective agency. Life without Frank Minna, the charismatic King of Brooklyn, would be unimaginable, so who cares if the tasks he sets them are, well, not exactly legal. But when Frank is fatally stabbed, one of Lionel's colleagues lands in jail, the other two vie for his position, and the victim's widow skips town. Lionel's world is suddenly topsy-turvy, and this outcast who has trouble even conversing attempts to untangle the threads of the case while trying to keep the words straight in his head.
Subjects: Private investigators, Orphans, Fiction, Patients, Tourette syndrome, Fiction, mystery & detective, general
