How long does it take to read The Hound of the Baskervilles?

The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle is about 59,000 words long, so it takes about 3 hours 47 minutes to read at the average adult reading speed for fiction (260 words a minute). On Scrolls it is 1,977 short chunks across 15 chapters; at 10 minutes a day you would finish it in 23 days.

59,019words
3 h 47 minreading time
1,977chunks on Scrolls
~7 sper chunk

Updated 5 November 2026. Counted from the Scrolls edition.

How many days will it take to read The Hound of the Baskervilles?

It depends on how many minutes a day you read. At 260 words a minute:

Reading a dayDays to finish
5 minutes46 days
10 minutes23 days
15 minutes16 days
20 minutes12 days
30 minutes8 days

About The Hound of the Baskervilles

Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1902 Sherlock Holmes novel. Dr Watson is sent to Dartmoor to guard the heir of Baskerville Hall against a family curse and the spectral hound said to haunt the moor.

It opens:

Mr. Sherlock Holmes, who was usually very late in the mornings, save upon those not infrequent occasions when he was up all night, was seated at the breakfast table.

Chapters and reading times

The Hound of the Baskervilles has 15 chapters. The longest takes about 26 minutes; the shortest about 9 minutes.

#ChapterWordsTimeChunks
1Mr. Sherlock Holmes2,2419 min74
2The Curse of the Baskervilles3,84615 min119
3The Problem2,89211 min91
4Sir Henry Baskerville4,05216 min130
5Three Broken Threads3,40913 min107
6Baskerville Hall3,48913 min121
7The Stapletons of Merripit House4,96319 min168
8First Report of Dr. Watson2,75511 min99
9The Light upon the Moor [Second Report of Dr. Watson]6,64426 min223
10Extract from the Diary of Dr. Watson3,65314 min129
11The Man on the Tor4,56118 min161
12Death on the Moor4,83019 min161
13Fixing the Nets3,43813 min110
14The Hound of the Baskervilles4,16616 min144
15A Retrospection4,08016 min140

How to read The Hound of the Baskervilles on Scrolls

The Hound of the Baskervilles is free to read on Scrolls, the whole book. Scrolls shows it one short chunk per screen: swipe up for the next, the way you move through a feed, and your place syncs across devices.

How we worked this out

We counted the words in the edition you read on Scrolls, then divided by 260 words a minute, the average adult silent reading rate for English fiction in a review of 190 studies: Brysbaert (2019), “How many words do we read per minute? A review and meta-analysis of reading rate”, Journal of Memory and Language 109. Fast readers will take less time and careful readers more; a Scrolls chunk averages about 7 seconds at that speed.

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