How long does it take to read The Collected Works of Billy the Kid?
Left-Handed Poems
The Collected Works of Billy the Kid by Michael Ondaatje takes about 2 hours 4 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 2 hours 4 minutes
An evening's read
First published 1970. 113 pages, about 31,075 words.
5 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 3 hours 27 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 2 hours 4 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 1 hour 18 minutes |
The page count is the median across 28 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, by Michael Ondaatje, won the 1970 Governor General's Literary Award. Ondaatje's hauntingly disturbing evocation of the life and death of the 19th-century American outlaw placed him in the forefront of the new generation of Canadian poets emerging in the 1970s. The Collected Works commences with a list of 20 men killed by Billy the Kid and a foreshadowing of his own death. Using a highly visual, visceral poetic style featuring violent surreal images of madness and men killed in gun fights, shifts in time and perspective, and impressionistic fragments of Billy's existence, Ondaatje traces his capture, escape and eventual death at the hands of Pat Garrett, the "ideal assassin." Following the publication of The Collected Works by House of Anansi in 1970, a dozen major productions of a stage adaptation were held across Canada.(from The Canadian Encyclopedia)
Subjects: Billy, the Kid, Drama, Fiction, Literary collections, Miscellanea, Outlaws
