How long does it take to read The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois?
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers
The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers takes about 14 hours 58 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 14 hours 58 minutes
A week or two of reading
First published 2021. 816 pages, about 224,400 words.
30 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 24 hours 56 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 14 hours 58 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 9 hours 21 minutes |
The page count is the median across 11 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
The great scholar, W. E. B. Du Bois, once wrote about the Problem of race in America, and what he called “Double Consciousness,” a sensitivity that every African American possesses in order to survive. Since childhood, Ailey Pearl Garfield has understood Du Bois’s words all too well. Bearing the names of two formidable Black Americans—the revered choreographer Alvin Ailey and her great grandmother Pearl, the descendant of enslaved Georgians and tenant farmers—Ailey carries Du Bois’s Problem on her shoulders. Ailey is reared in the north in the City but spends summers in the small Georgia town of Chicasetta, where her mother’s family has lived since their ancestors arrived from Africa in bondage. From an early age, Ailey fights a battle for belonging that’s made all the more difficult by a hovering trauma, as well as the whispers of women—her mother, Belle, her sister, Lydia, and a maternal line reaching back two centuries—that urge Ailey to succeed in their stead. To come to terms with her own identity, Ailey embarks on a journey through her family’s past, uncovering the shocking tales of generations of ancestors—Indigenous, Black, and white—in the deep South. In doing so Ailey must learn to embrace her full heritage, a legacy of oppression and resistance, bondage and independence, cruelty and resilience that is the story—and the song—of America itself.
Subjects: Contemporary Women, heritage, fiction, history, African American women, African American families
