How long does it take to read The Overstory?
The Overstory by Richard Powers takes about 9 hours 44 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 9 hours 44 minutes
A week or two of reading
First published 2018. 531 pages, about 146,025 words.
20 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 16 hours 14 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 9 hours 44 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 6 hours 5 minutes |
The page count is the median across 19 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
The Overstory unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fable that range from antebellum New York to the late-twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. An Air Force loadmaster in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan. An artist inherits a hundred years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut. A hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s electrocutes herself, dies, and is sent back into life by creatures of air and light. A hearing- and speech-impaired scientist discovers that trees are communicating with one another. These and five other strangers, each summoned in different ways by trees, are brought together in a last stand to save the continent's few remaining acres of virgin forest. There is a world alongside ours—vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.
Subjects: trees, forest, conservation, environment, activism, Forest conservation
