How long does it take to read The Innocence of Father Brown?
The Innocence of Father Brown by G. K. Chesterton is about 79,000 words long, so it takes about 5 hours 3 minutes to read at the average adult reading speed for fiction (260 words a minute). On Scrolls it is 2,713 short chunks across 12 stories; at 10 minutes a day you would finish it in 31 days.
How many days will it take to read The Innocence of Father Brown?
It depends on how many minutes a day you read. At 260 words a minute:
| Reading a day | Days to finish |
|---|---|
| 5 minutes | 61 days |
| 10 minutes | 31 days |
| 15 minutes | 21 days |
| 20 minutes | 16 days |
| 30 minutes | 11 days |
About The Innocence of Father Brown
G. K. Chesterton’s 1911 collection of twelve stories about Father Brown, a Catholic priest who solves crimes through his understanding of people, beginning with The Blue Cross.
It opens:
Between the silver ribbon of morning and the green glittering ribbon of sea, the boat touched Harwich and let loose a swarm of folk like flies, among whom the man we must follow was by no means conspicuous—nor wished to be.
Stories and reading times
The Innocence of Father Brown has 12 stories. The longest takes about 29 minutes; the shortest about 19 minutes.
| # | Story | Words | Time | Chunks |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Blue Cross | 7,470 | 29 min | 267 |
| 2 | The Secret Garden | 7,500 | 29 min | 271 |
| 3 | The Queer Feet | 7,618 | 29 min | 269 |
| 4 | The Flying Stars | 5,320 | 20 min | 177 |
| 5 | The Invisible Man | 6,471 | 25 min | 206 |
| 6 | The Honour of Israel Gow | 5,619 | 22 min | 195 |
| 7 | The Wrong Shape | 6,950 | 27 min | 227 |
| 8 | The Sins of Prince Saradine | 7,398 | 28 min | 252 |
| 9 | The Hammer of God | 6,375 | 25 min | 222 |
| 10 | The Eye of Apollo | 6,180 | 24 min | 211 |
| 11 | The Sign of the Broken Sword | 6,894 | 27 min | 246 |
| 12 | The Three Tools of Death | 5,017 | 19 min | 170 |
How to read The Innocence of Father Brown on Scrolls
The Innocence of Father Brown is included in Scrolls Library, the Scrolls subscription. You can read the first story free as a sample before you subscribe. 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.
Other books on Scrolls
- How long does it take to read Alice's Adventures in Wonderland? About 1 hour 41 minutes.
- How long does it take to read The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes? About 6 hours 41 minutes.
- How long does it take to read A Study in Scarlet? About 2 hours 46 minutes.
- How long does it take to read The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsène Lupin? About 3 hours 27 minutes.
Read The Innocence of Father Brown the way you scroll
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