How long does it take to read The Book of Imaginary Beings?
The Book of Imaginary Beings by Jorge Luis Borges takes about 4 hours 27 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 4 hours 27 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1967. 243 pages, about 66,825 words.
9 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 7 hours 26 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 4 hours 27 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 2 hours 47 minutes |
The page count is the median across 41 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
The master, writing with sometime collaborator Guerrero, compiled 82 one- and two-page descriptions of everything from "The Borametz" (a Chinese "plant shaped like a lamb, covered with golden fleece") to "The Simurgh" ("an immortal bird that makes its nest in the tree of science") and "The Zaratan" (a particularly cunning whale) in An Anthology of Fantastic Zoology in 1954. He added 34 more (and illustrations) for a 1967 edition, giving it the present title, and it was published in English in 1969. This edition, with fresh translations from Borges's Collected Fictions translator Hurley, and new illustrations from Caldecott-winner Sis, gives the beings new life. They prove the perfect foils for classic Borgesian musings on everything from biblical etymology to the underworld, giving the creatures particularly (and, via Sis, whimsically) vivid and perfectly scaled shape. "We do not know what the dragon means, just as we do not know the meaning of the universe," Borges (1899-1986) and Guerrero write in a preface, and the genius of this book is that it seems to easily contain the latter within it.
Subjects: Animals, Mythical, Mythical Animals
