How long does it take to read Why Read the Classics??
Why Read the Classics? by Italo Calvino takes about 5 hours 5 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 5 hours 5 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1999. 277 pages, about 76,175 words.
11 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 8 hours 28 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 5 hours 5 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 3 hours 10 minutes |
The page count is the median across 5 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
Italo Calvino was not only a prolific master of fiction, he was also an uncanny reader of literature, a keen critic of astonishing range. Why Read the Classics? is the most comprehensive collection of Calvino's literary criticism available in English, accounting for the enduring importance to our lives of crucial writers of the Western canon. Here--spanning more than two millennia, from antiquity to postmodernism--are thirty-six immediately relevant, elegantly written, accessible ruminations on the writers, poets, and scientists who meant most to Calvino at different stages of his life.Following the title essay, which explores fourteen definitions of "the classic," Calvino offers writings that are at once critical appraisals and personal appreciations of, among others: Homer, Xenophon, Ovid, Pliny, Nezami, Ariosto, Cardano, Galileo, Defoe, Voltaire, Diderot, Ortes, Stendhal, Balzac, Dickens, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Twain, Henry James, Stevenson, Conrad, Pasternak, Gadda, Montale, Hemingway, Ponge, Borges, and Queneau.At a time when the Western canon and the very notion of "literary greatness" have come under increasing disparagement by the vanguard of so-called multiculturalism, Why Read the Classics? gives us an inspiriting corrective.From the Hardcover edition.
Subjects: Canon (Literature), Best books, History and criticism, Literary Criticism, Nonfiction, Literature, history and criticism
