How long does it take to read The Magic Mountain?
The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann takes about 13 hours 22 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 13 hours 22 minutes
A week or two of reading
First published 1924. 729 pages, about 200,475 words.
27 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 22 hours 17 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 13 hours 22 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 8 hours 21 minutes |
The page count is the median across 188 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
One of the most influential and celebrated German works of the 20th century has been newly rendered in English by Woods, twice winner of the PEN Translation Prize. First published in 1929, Mann's novel tells the story of Hans Castorp, a modern everyman who spends seven years in an Alpine sanatorium for tuberculosis patients, finally leaving to become a soldier in World War I. Isolated from the concerns of the everyday world, he is exposed to the wide range of ideas that shaped a world on the verge of explosion. Considering what was to follow, the most poignant moment comes when Naphta, a Jewish-born Jesuit, defends the use of terror and the taking of life for the sake of an all-encompassing idea. Woods's work reads more naturally than the original translation, which, while faithful to the German, was stiff and forbidding. A necessary addition to any fiction collection.
Subjects: Fiction, Sanatoriums, German fiction, Philosophy, Civilization, Special Hospitals
