How long does it take to read The Broken Bubble?
The Broken Bubble by Philip K. Dick takes about 4 hours 36 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 4 hours 36 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1988. 251 pages, about 69,025 words.
10 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 7 hours 40 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 4 hours 36 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 2 hours 53 minutes |
The page count is the median across 4 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
Set in San Francisco in 1956, The Broken Bubble traces the ups and downs and ins and outs of four characters who are not quite sure of the lives they're living. Jim Briskin, local radio DJ, his ex-wife Pat, the young married couple Art and Rachel Emmanual, all are acutely observed and sympathetically portrayed. Briskin is suspended from his job for refusing to read a particularly repellant ad, while Art foolishly gets mixed up in a group of absurd would-be revolutionaries. As they all get entangled and not quite disentangled with each other, it becomes apparent they are seeking only, in typical Dick fashion, to live more or less happily, if not ever after, then at least for a while. Modest as it may seem, it is an ambition very difficult to achieve.
Subjects: Social life and customs, Fiction, Disc jockeys, Nineteen fifties, Dysfunctional families, Fiction, general
