How Many Pages a Week Should a Book Club Read?

A book club almost never dies in an argument. It dies quietly, in month four, when three of the seven members turn up having read to chapter nine and the conversation has to be about chapter nine. Do that twice and the people who did finish stop bothering, because there is no point finishing a book you cannot talk about the end of.

The cause is nearly always the same, and it is arithmetic rather than enthusiasm: somebody chose a book without checking it against the gap before the next meeting.

The short version, if you only want the number: for a club meeting monthly, around 75 to 90 pages a week is the realistic ceiling for most groups — which puts the sensible maximum book at roughly 300 to 350 pages. Everything below is where that comes from, how to adjust it for the kind of book you have chosen, and how to build a year that holds.

Start with hours, not pages

Pages are the wrong unit. A page of Cormac McCarthy and a page of a mass-market thriller are not the same amount of work, and your members are not budgeting pages — they are budgeting evenings.

So convert. Two published figures make this straightforward:

Reading speed. The most thorough review of the question is Marc Brysbaert’s 2019 meta-analysis in the Journal of Memory and Language, which pooled 190 studies covering more than 18,000 participants. It found an average silent reading rate for adults in English of 260 words per minute for fiction and 238 words per minute for non-fiction — the gap explained mostly by non-fiction using longer words. (Checked 2026-08-28.)

Words per page. Publishing works to a standard estimate of 250 to 300 words per page for a typical novel at a normal trim size and font. Small mass-market paperbacks pack in more; large-print and heavily-spaced literary editions rather less.

Put those together at the midpoint — 260 words a minute, 275 words a page — and you get a working figure of a little under 60 pages an hour for average adult reading of fiction. For non-fiction, call it 50.

Those are averages across thousands of people, not a target. Individual speeds vary enormously, and someone in your group reads at half that rate while someone else reads at twice. The point of the number is not to grade anyone. It is to convert a book’s page count into a demand on people’s week before you commit the club to it.

The 90-minute rule

Here is the honest constraint. Members of a social book club are not reading every night. In practice most people read on two or three evenings a week, for half an hour or so, plus perhaps a longer stretch at the weekend. Budget about 90 minutes of reading a week and you are describing the middle of a normal group rather than its most devoted member.

Ninety minutes a week, at the rates above:

Read the last column as the number that matters. It is not “how long a book can a person read”. It is “how long a book can this group read and still all arrive having finished it”, which is a much smaller number and the only one that keeps a club alive.

If you meet fortnightly rather than monthly, halve that final column. This is the single most common scheduling mistake — a club moves to fortnightly meetings for the sociability and keeps choosing the same size of book.

What to do when the book is too long anyway

Sometimes the group genuinely wants the 700-page one. Three workable options, in order of how well they tend to go:

Split it across two meetings with a hard checkpoint. Not “we’ll see how far everyone gets” — a named stopping place: to the end of Part Two, page 388. The checkpoint has to be a chapter or part boundary, because “page 388” means different pages in different editions, and somebody will be reading it on a phone where pages do not exist at all. Give the page number for planning and the chapter for authority.

Give it a longer gap. Six weeks instead of four, announced when the book is chosen rather than conceded in week five. A club that skips a month deliberately looks organised. A club that postpones twice looks like it is ending.

Choose it for the holiday slot. Most groups have one period a year — a summer break, the fortnight around Christmas — where people genuinely have more reading time. That is where the long book goes, and it is worth planning the year so the slot is not wasted on a 200-page novella.

What does not work is choosing the long book for a normal gap and hoping. You already know how that meeting goes.

Build the calendar backwards

The reason pace goes wrong is almost always that books get picked first and dates get picked second. Reverse it.

1. Fix the meeting dates for the whole year first. Second Tuesday of the month, or whatever survives contact with your group. Put all twelve down at once, including the ones that land awkwardly near holidays — those are exactly the gaps you need to see in advance.
2. Write the gap in weeks next to each one. They are not all four. A mid-December meeting followed by a mid-January one is often five or six weeks; two meetings either side of a bank holiday might be three.
3. Then fit books to gaps, using the last column of the table above. A three-week gap gets the short book. The six-week gap over the holidays gets the doorstop everyone has been threatening to suggest.
4. Track who chose and who hosted. Not out of bureaucracy — it is the simplest fix for the two complaints that actually break up book clubs, which are “we only ever read her sort of book” and “it’s always at my house”. A visible rotation settles both without anyone having to raise it.

Twelve books a year at an average of 350 pages is about 4,200 pages, or roughly 70 hours of reading. Said out loud that is a real commitment, and it is worth a group knowing the size of the thing they are agreeing to in January rather than discovering it in April.

The one number to put in the invitation

Whatever you use to remind people about the meeting, put the pace in it: Tuesday 14th, chapters 1–14, about 80 pages a week from here.

It sounds fussy. It is the single highest-return thing a host does, for a reason that has nothing to do with organisation: a person who is behind will usually drop out silently rather than admit it. Telling them the weekly rate lets them see they are one evening behind rather than hopelessly lost, and one evening behind is recoverable. Most attendance problems in book clubs are really this problem.

If you want to go further, the same maths works for individual reading goals — a 52-book year is 52 × 350 pages ÷ 52 weeks, which is 350 pages a week, or about six hours. Whether that is realistic for you is a different question, but at least it is now a question with a number in it rather than a vague ambition in January.

Two other things worth reading if you are the one organising: how to outline a novel without killing the fun, for when a club member inevitably admits they are writing one; and Excel versus Google Sheets, if you are deciding where to keep a schedule several people need to see.