I previously wrote a spoiler-free overview, a series by series reading experience report, and a deep dive into the book series Realm of the Elderlings by Robin Hobb. This post here will conclude my blog posts about Realm of the Elderlings with some data, both about the books themselves, as well as my personal reading statistics and ratings.

First, let’s look at the books and the series as a whole. I have read the physical paperback books published by Harper Voyager UK, so all my stats are based on those editions. There are 16 books in this series, which can be divided into 5 sub-series with 3/4 books each. In total, the entire series has 10933 pages, and on average 683 pages per book – though this wildly fluctuates, with the very first book, Assassin’s Apprentice, having “only” 392 pages, and the longest books being all of the Liveship Traders books with 880, 906 and 903 pages each. On average though, the shortest series is The Rain Wild Chronicles, with an average of 520 pages per book (actual counts are 553, 570, 425 and 532).

From these plots we can see that The Liveship Traders is the biggest in regards to total page count in the entire series. However, one thing I noticed while reading these books, is that the font size and number of lines per page can be wildly inconsistent. Whoever did the typesetting for these books didn’t pay attention. That’s why I counted the lines per page in each book and calculated my own measurement for the books called Length. Length is calculated by taking the number of pages and multiplying it by the number of lines per page. It is then further normalized to a value between 0 to 1, with 0 being the shortest and 1 being the longest book. For the purposes of these charts, I edited the items with value 0 to have a value of 0.005, otherwise they would not be displayed. The complete formula for this is Length = (Pages * Lines per Page) / 100 and NormalizedLength = (Length - min(Length)) / (max(Length) - min (Length)).

Well, now things look quite differently! The shortest book of the series is still Assassin’s Apprentice, but the longest book is actually Assassin’s Fate. The whole Rain Wild Chronicles are suddenly even shorter since they all have the lowest number of lines per page with 33.

Stacking these, the longest series in total is still The Liveship Traders.

How does this look for each setting, as in Six Duchies books narrated by Fitz, and the Cursed Shores novels?

We can see that the Six Duchies are about a third longer than the whole Cursed Shores novels. But obviously in later books there is some crossover between these settings, and Assassin’s Fate can be regarded as concluding the Cursed Shores novels as well.

It should be noted that even though this representation is slightly more accurate to estimate the actual book length, it’s still not 100% perfect. One factor that I didn’t account for is the empty space between chapters, so at best this represents an average measurement. The only true way to know which books are the longest and shortest is to count words or characters. I presume this might be doable with eBooks, but having read the physical books, I don’t have access to that.

And when looking at this, you might ask yourself: Does the book’s length even matter? Of course it doesn’t. Each book is as long as it needs to be for the story to be told. I just enjoy fiddling with data, and this gives me a good baseline to estimate how long it took me to read these books.

So how long did it take me to read all of that? In total, it took me half a year, that’s 25 weeks or 177 days. Ironically, it took me the longest to read the shortest book of the series, Assassin’s Apprentice. This is merely because it took me some time to get into the book for numerous reasons. It was hard for me to find the time to read during that time, and generally it can be a bit overwhelming to keep track of all the different characters that are introduced within a fairly short period of time (much unlike Hobb’s later novels in this series, which are increasingly slow-paced and verbose). But once I got going with Assassin’s Apprentice, I finished most of it within 2 days, and from then onwards it took me an average of 11 days to finish a book, depending on the length.

When displayed as a timeline, it would look like this:

The book that I read the fastest was Fool’s Quest, which is a bit ironic, because there’s not that much actual plot in this book. I suppose I was just really eager to start the final book, despite knowing that it would probably be heartbreaking, both story-wise, and knowing that my time with these books would be coming to an end.

But as previously explained, the books vary greatly not only in length, but also in their typesetting. So if I use my self-calculated variable Length as a base for calculating my reading speed, I get a new measurement Speed (Days / Length). This I also normalized as NormalizedSpeed = (Speed - min(Speed)) / (max(Speed) - min (Speed)), in which 1 represents the slowest reading speed, and 0 the fastest.

My reading speed depended a lot on the series I was reading. Generally I enjoyed reading the Six Duchies novels way more than the Cursed Shores novels, as I already lamented in my reading experience post. Both Cursed Shores sub-series start out with an overwhelming amount of new POV characters, which I found incredibly hard to get into after just spending all my time with Fitz before.

As is easily observed here, I absolutely devoured The Tawny Man and Fitz and the Fool. So what does reading speed actually mean for me? It is certainly one measurement of how much I enjoyed the books, but my reading speed was usually also highly dependent on external circumstances. Sometimes real life is just more important, and therefore sometimes it’s hard to find the time to read. Ultimately, the only variable that can truly express how much I enjoyed each book is my rating. I used my ratings from my StoryGraph reviews here, which are values between 1 and 5, with .25 steps in between.

Ultimately, all these metrics don’t say a lot about something that is highly subjective. My absolute favorite book of the entire series remains Fool’s Fate of The Tawny Man series, even though there were other books in this series that I devoured faster.

And with this, my series of blog posts on Realm of the Elderlings concludes. It was a great reading experience and I’m looking forward to reading these books again one day.