How long does it take to read The Great Ideas, Volume 2?
Mortimer J. Adler, William Gorman
The Great Ideas, Volume 2 by Mortimer J. Adler, William Gorman takes about 24 hours 41 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 24 hours 41 minutes
A long haul
First published 1952. 1,346 pages, about 370,150 words.
50 days (about 8 weeks) at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 41 hours 8 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 24 hours 41 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 15 hours 25 minutes |
The page count is the median across 1 edition, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
A Syntopicon: An Index to The Great Ideas (1952) is a two-volume index, published as volumes 2 and 3 of Encyclopædia Britannica’s collection Great Books of the Western World. Compiled by Mortimer Adler, an American philosopher, under the guidance of Robert Hutchins, president of the University of Chicago, the volumes were billed as a collection of the 102 great ideas of the western canon. The term “syntopicon” was coined specifically for this undertaking, meaning “a collection of topics.” The volumes catalogued what Adler and his team deemed to be the fundamental ideas contained in the works of the Great Books of the Western World, which stretched chronologically from Homer to Freud. The Syntopicon lists, under each idea, where every occurrence of the concept can be located in the collection’s famous works.
