Sunday, February 10, 2013

jest one more thing

A couple of follows-up to the previous post, which I felt was getting long enough as it was without throwing any extra stats-geekery in:
  • the 96 days that the book took to read is comfortably the longest book-reading duration in this list, beating the 66 days it took me to read Sunset Song;
  • that works out at 11.24 pages per day, which is, coincidentally, broadly the same sort of page rate as the previous book in this series, Clea, so I haven't been hanging about, it's just a really long book;
  • this also takes the record for the longest book in this series from the previous holder, Until I Find You - as I've suggested elsewhere this doesn't tell the whole story though, as Infinite Jest is printed in much smaller print at 44 lines per page instead of 38 for Until I Find You. The footnotes are printed even smaller, as it happens, but just taking the main text as the benchmark, if it were printed at 38 lines per page it would be 1249 pages long. And that of course doesn't take into account that there will be more words per line in the original owing to the smaller font size as well;
  • Sunset Song retains the title of slowest pages-per-day rate at a sluggish 3.91 pages per day (258 pages in 66 days). I'm not sure what else I was up to at the time (August 2008), but it is just pretty chewy going. The only other book in this list that occupied me for longer than 50 days was The Name Of The Rose at 53. 

No comments: