How long does it take to read your favorite children's book? Personal Creations found out, and while you can probably read faster than the average kid, it's fascinating to see just how much or little time these popular books take to read.
How long it takes to read popular children’s books, charted
Lauren Katz is a senior project manager at Vox, focusing on newsroom-wide editorial initiatives as well as podcast engagement strategy.
Comparing children’s book lengths to reading levels
The site took the average reading speed for different school grades and the number of words in children's literature to determine the answers. For example, it would take the average fourth-grader about 139 hours to finish all 1,084,551 words in the Harry Potter series. Here's the guide:
Second-grade reading speed
Third-grade reading speed
Fourth-grade reading speed
The Harry Potter books appear to have grown up alongside their original audience since Sorcerer’s Stone was published in 1997. The length of the books became progressively longer, with deeper, darker plot lines as the series unfolded. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain is the only other book on the fourth-grade list with a similar length.
You can see the full list of reading times for many other children's books here. Personal Creations came out with a similar list in 2014, detailing how long it would take readers to finish the books you've probably been meaning to read, like Gone With the Wind and Gulliver's Travels. Happy reading!
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