Cornish Characters and Strange Events vs My Life — Volume 1
Both counted from their full texts, the same way, on the same day.
8,038words between them — 32 min of it
Cornish Characters and Strange Events is longer — 228,139 words against 220,101 for My Life — Volume 1, a difference of 8,038 words or about 32 min of extra reading. My Life — Volume 1 is the harder read, at grade 14.7 against 10.8.
SOURCE·Project Gutenberg full texts·both editions counted the same way·REVIEWED JUL 2026
Side by side
| Cornish Characters and Strange Events | My Life — Volume 1 | |
|---|---|---|
| Author | Baring-Gould, S. (Sabine) | Wagner, Richard |
| Words | 228,139 | 220,101 |
| Reading time at 250 wpm | 15h 13m | 14h 40m |
| Unique words | 18,324 | 13,674 |
| Sentences | 9,596 | 6,740 |
| Average sentence length | 23.8 words | 32.7 words |
| Reading grade | 10.8 | 14.7 |
| Reading ease | 59.9 | 47.5 |
| Long words | 10.6% | 12.7% |
Highlighted cells are the larger figure — except reading ease, where higher means easier.
SOURCE·Project Gutenberg full texts·both editions, same counting rule·REVIEWED JUL 2026
How this is worked out
- Both texts are counted the same way, from the same source, with Gutenberg's header and licence footer struck first.
- The gap is stated in words and then in time at 250 words a minute — the rate is printed because a duration without one cannot be checked.
- Difficulty is compared on Flesch–Kincaid grade, which reads sentence and word length only. It cannot see irony or dialect, so treat it as a measure of surface, not of effort.
gap = |228,139 − 220,101| = 8,038 words 8,038 ÷ 250 wpm = 32 min of extra reading
The second question
Which is longer, Cornish Characters and Strange Events or My Life — Volume 1?
Cornish Characters and Strange Events is longer — 228,139 words against 220,101 for My Life — Volume 1, a difference of 8,038 words or about 32 min of extra reading. My Life — Volume 1 is the harder read, at grade 14.7 against 10.8.
Colophon
Both figures computed from Project Gutenberg plain-text editions — ebook no. 41775 and no. 5197 — and from no other source. Neither book’s text is set on this site.
SOURCE·Project Gutenberg full texts·US public domain·REVIEWED JUL 2026
Word counts and reading levels are computed from a specific public-domain edition and will differ from other editions and from other counting methods — see the method page.
