How long does it take to read Retromania?
Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past
Retromania by Simon Reynolds takes about 8 hours 24 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 8 hours 24 minutes
A week or two of reading
First published 2011. 458 pages, about 125,950 words.
17 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 14 hours |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 8 hours 24 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 5 hours 15 minutes |
The page count is the median across 7 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
We live in a pop age gone loco for retro and crazy for commemoration. Band re-formations and reunion tours, expanded reissues of classic albums and outtake-crammed box sets, remakes and sequels, tribute albums and mash-ups . . . But what happens when we run out of past? Are we heading toward a sort of culturalecological catastrophe where the archival stream of pop history has been exhausted? Simon Reynolds, one of the finest music writers of his generation, argues that we have indeed reached a tipping point, and that although earlier eras had their own obsessions with antiquity—the Renaissance with its admiration for Roman and Greek classicism, the Gothic movement’s invocations of medievalism—never has there been a society so obsessed with the cultural artifacts of its own immediate past. Retromania is the first book to examine the retro industry and ask the question: Is this retromania a death knell for any originality and distinctiveness of our own?
Subjects: Popular music, Music, Social aspects, Popular culture, History and criticism, History
