How long does it take to read Plain Tales from the Hills?
Plain Tales from the Hills by Rudyard Kipling takes about 5 hours 11 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 5 hours 11 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1800. 283 pages, about 77,825 words.
11 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 8 hours 39 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 5 hours 11 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 3 hours 15 minutes |
The page count is the median across 303 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
Originally written for the Lahore Civil and Military Gazette, the stories were intended for a provincial readership familiar with the pleasures and miseries of colonial life. For the subsequent English edition, Kipling revised the tales so as to recreate as vividly as possible the sights and smells of India for those at home. Yet far from being a celebration of Empire, Kipling's stories tell of 'heat and bewilderment and wasted effort and broken faith'. He writes brilliantly and hauntingly about the barriers between the races, the classes and the sexes; and about innocence, not transformed into experience but implacably crushed.
Subjects: Fiction, History, British, Correspondence, Short Stories, Social life and customs
