How long does it take to read The Last Thing He Wanted?
The Last Thing He Wanted by Joan Didion takes about 4 hours 10 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 4 hours 10 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1996. 227 pages, about 62,425 words.
9 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 6 hours 56 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 4 hours 10 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 2 hours 36 minutes |
The page count is the median across 10 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
This is a story that begins when Elena McMahon, estranged from her powerful husband in California and covering the 1984 primary campaign for the Washington Post, makes her way to Florida to see her father, Dick McMahon, who does deals. Tracing Elena's fevered trajectory, the narrator makes it clear that this is her version of what happened, not the version offered by the F.B.I. interviews or by Senator Mark Berquist or by the late Ambassador-at-Large Treat Morrisson. What happens is a story that shifts quickly from Elena's well-mapped life expensive people and political fund-raisers to a journey without maps, an investigation into the randomness of history, into intentions spun out of control and gone wrong, arms dealing, covert action, assassination. As connections are made between November 22, 1963, and Iran-Contra and Castro and Cuba, we begin to see what the narrator/author calls history's subtext. Joan Didion has given us an exploration of menace and ellipsis charged with irony, exciting in its storytelling and intellectual reach - a story that clicks into place only in the final pages.
Subjects: Americans, Fiction, Illegal arms transfers, Women journalists, Fiction, espionage, Fiction, political
