How long does it take to read Oblivion?
Oblivion by David Foster Wallace takes about 6 hours 6 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 6 hours 6 minutes
A weekend read
First published 2004. 333 pages, about 91,575 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 11 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 6 hours 6 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 3 hours 49 minutes |
The page count is the median across 5 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
In the stories that make up Oblivion, David Foster Wallace joins the rawest, most naked humanity with the infinite involutions of self-consciousness--a combination that is dazzlingly, uniquely his. These are worlds undreamt-of by any other mind. Only David Foster Wallace could convey a father's desperate loneliness by way of his son's daydreaming through a teacher's homicidal breakdown ("The Soul Is Not a Smithy"). Or could explore the deepest and most hilarious aspects of creativity by delineating the office politics surrounding a magazine profile of an artist who produces miniature sculptures in an anatomically inconceivable way ("The Suffering Channel"). Or capture the ache of love's breakdown in the painfully polite apologies of a man who believes his wife is hallucinating the sound of his snoring ("Oblivion"). Each of these stories is a complete world, as fully imagined as most entire novels, at once preposterously surreal and painfully immediate. Oblivion is an arresting and hilarious creation from a writer "whose best work challenges and reinvents the art of fiction" (Atlanta Journal-Constitution).
Subjects: Fiction, Short stories, Fiction, short stories (single author), Nouvelles, American Short stories
