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Frankenstein

Mary Shelley · 1818 · 75,038 words
3:47:43
at 360 wpm · the whole book
The audiobook runs about eight and a half hours.

Victor Frankenstein tells the whole thing to a ship's captain iced in on his way to the pole, so you learn early that it ended badly. He was seventeen when his parents sent him from Geneva to Ingolstadt, and four years later he built a body out of charnel houses and the dissecting room, alone, in one room under the roof, up a staircase from everybody else in the building. Shelley never says how he starts it breathing; the lightning belongs to the 1931 film. He runs. What he leaves behind teaches itself to speak, reads Paradise Lost, and comes back to demand a wife. A fifth of the book is the creature's own account. Victor narrates the rest at a constant pitch of anguish.

28 chapters · begin at the beginning
Letter 13:38begin ▸
·Letter 23:57sealed
·Letter 30:56sealed
·Letter 48:16sealed
·Chapter 15:22sealed
·Chapter 26:38sealed
·Chapter 38:08sealed
·Chapter 47:35sealed
·Chapter 57:09sealed
·Chapter 68:23sealed
·Chapter 711:04sealed
·Chapter 89:31sealed
·Chapter 96:42sealed
·Chapter 107:16sealed
·Chapter 118:47sealed
·Chapter 126:21sealed
·Chapter 136:12sealed
·Chapter 145:32sealed
·Chapter 159:16sealed
·Chapter 169:44sealed
·Chapter 175:45sealed
·Chapter 188:36sealed
·Chapter 197:51sealed
·Chapter 2010:35sealed
·Chapter 2111:14sealed
·Chapter 2210:20sealed
·Chapter 237:48sealed
·Chapter 2425:06sealed

How long does it take to read Frankenstein?

Frankenstein is 75,038 words. At an average adult reading pace of 300 words a minute that is about 4 hr 10 min, or roughly 3 hr 8 min if you read quickly and 6 hr 15 min at a more deliberate 200 words a minute.

That count is measured from the complete public-domain text rather than estimated from a page count, so you can compare all the books side by side.

Text: Frankenstein, Mary Shelley (1818), public domain, via Project Gutenberg. · You read at the book's authored pace; nothing here is stored anywhere but this browser. · About Midsentence