How long does it take to read The Debt to Pleasure?
a novel
John Lanchester
The Debt to Pleasure by John Lanchester takes about 4 hours 36 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 4 hours 36 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1996. 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 8 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
An Englishman of indeterminate age whose spiritual home has always been France, Tarquin embarks on a journey of the senses, regaling us with his wickedly funny, poisonously opinionated meditations on everything from the erotics of dislike to the psychology of a menu, from the perverse history of the peach to the brutalization of the British palate, from cheese as "the corpse of milk" to the binding action of blood. As Tarquin peels away the layers of his past, he proves himself a master of sly wit and subversive ideas. Only gradually, insidiously, do the outlines of a distinctly quirky aesthetic and a highly eccentric moral philosophy emerge, until the truth becomes unavoidable: This is not the voluptuary's memoir it purports to be, and Tarquin Winot is a master of something more than wit and opinion, something infinitely, quiveringly, sinister.
Subjects: Fiction, Food habits, British, Food writers, Dinners and dining, Cookery
