By — Kristin Miller Kristin Miller Leave your feedback Share Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/arts/fourteen-books-read-time-takes-watch-super-bowl-2 Email Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Pinterest Tumblr Share on Facebook Share on Twitter 14 books you could read in the time it takes to watch the Super Bowl Arts Feb 1, 2015 2:02 PM EDT Editor’s note: This post was originally published on Feb. 2, 2014. If you just watch the game, a conservative estimate of the running time of the Super Bowl is at least three and a half hours. Add in the pre-game and post-game analysis and the entire event could top six hours. What else could you be doing with that time? Reading a book is one option. According to Forbes magazine — which did the math in the article “Do You Read Fast Enough to be Successful?” — the average adult has a reading speed of about 300 words per minute. The book publishing standard runs to approximately 250 words per page. So, an average adult should be able to read at least one 200-page book during the Super Bowl. Access the full text or learn more about the 14 books below: “The Little Prince,” Antoine de Saint-Exupéry “Casino Royale,” Ian Fleming “The Wasteland,” T.S. Eliot “We Have Always Lived in the Castle,” Shirley Jackson “The Hound of the Baskervilles,” Sir Arthur Conan Doyle “The Great Gatsby,” F. Scott Fitzgerald “The Interpreter of Maladies,” Jhumpa Lahiri “Metamorphosis,” Franz Kafka “Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time,” Dava Sobel “Into the Wild,” Jon Krakauer “Frankenstein, Or the Modern Prometheus,” Mary Shelley ‘Animal Farm,” George Orwell “The War of the Worlds,” H.G. Wells “The Old Man and the Sea,” Ernest Hemingway By — Kristin Miller Kristin Miller
Editor’s note: This post was originally published on Feb. 2, 2014. If you just watch the game, a conservative estimate of the running time of the Super Bowl is at least three and a half hours. Add in the pre-game and post-game analysis and the entire event could top six hours. What else could you be doing with that time? Reading a book is one option. According to Forbes magazine — which did the math in the article “Do You Read Fast Enough to be Successful?” — the average adult has a reading speed of about 300 words per minute. The book publishing standard runs to approximately 250 words per page. So, an average adult should be able to read at least one 200-page book during the Super Bowl. Access the full text or learn more about the 14 books below: “The Little Prince,” Antoine de Saint-Exupéry “Casino Royale,” Ian Fleming “The Wasteland,” T.S. Eliot “We Have Always Lived in the Castle,” Shirley Jackson “The Hound of the Baskervilles,” Sir Arthur Conan Doyle “The Great Gatsby,” F. Scott Fitzgerald “The Interpreter of Maladies,” Jhumpa Lahiri “Metamorphosis,” Franz Kafka “Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time,” Dava Sobel “Into the Wild,” Jon Krakauer “Frankenstein, Or the Modern Prometheus,” Mary Shelley ‘Animal Farm,” George Orwell “The War of the Worlds,” H.G. Wells “The Old Man and the Sea,” Ernest Hemingway