How long does it take to read The Beautiful Room Is Empty?
The Beautiful Room Is Empty by Edmund White takes about 3 hours 39 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 3 hours 39 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1988. 199 pages, about 54,725 words.
8 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 6 hours 5 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 3 hours 39 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 2 hours 17 minutes |
The page count is the median across 10 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
When the narrator of White's poised yet scalding autobiographical novel first embarks on his sexual odyssey, it is the 1950s, and America is "a big gray country of families on drowsy holiday." That country has no room for a scholarly teenager with guilty but insatiable stirrings toward other men. Moving from a Midwestern college to the Stonewall Tavern on the night of the first gay uprising--and populated by eloquent queens, butch poseurs, and a fearfully incompetent shrink--The Beautiful Room is Empty conflates the acts of coming out and coming of age.
Subjects: Gay men, Fiction, Fiction, gay, LGBTQ novels, Lambda Literary Awards, Lambda Literary Award Winner
