How long does it take to read Reservation Blues?
Reservation Blues by Sherman Alexie takes about 5 hours 37 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 5 hours 37 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1995. 306 pages, about 84,150 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 21 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 5 hours 37 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 3 hours 30 minutes |
The page count is the median across 5 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
In 1931, Robert Johnson allegedly sold his soul to the devil, receiving legendary blues skills in return. He went on to record only twenty-nine songs before being murdered on August 16, 1938. In 1992, however, Johnson suddenly appears on the Spokane Indian Reservation and meets Thomas Builds-the-Fire, the misfit storyteller of the Spokane Tribe. So begins Reservation Blues, the mythic and musical tale of Coyote Springs, an all-Indian Catholic rock-and-roll band. With Thomas Builds-the-Fire as lead singer, Victor Joseph and Junior Polatkin on lead guitar and drums, and Chess and Checkers Warm Water on vocals, Coyote Springs takes their "four-and-a-half-chord rock and blues" to reservation bars, small town taverns, and the urban landscapes of Seattle and Manhattan. Sherman Alexie brilliantly mixes narrative, newspaper excerpts, songs, journal entries, visions, radio interviews, and dreams to explore the effects of Christianity on Native Americans in the late twentieth century. More important, he examines cultural assimilation's impact on the relationship between Indian women and Indian men. Reservation Blues is a painful, humorous, and ultimately redemptive symphony about God and indifference, faith and alcoholism, family and hunger, sex and death.
Subjects: Fiction, Spokane Indians, Spokane Indians in fiction, Indian reservations in fiction, Indian reservations, Indians of North America
