Essays of Michel de Montaigne — Complete vs Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte — Complete
Both counted from their full texts, the same way, on the same day.
36,312words between them — 2h 25m of it
Essays of Michel de Montaigne — Complete is longer — 525,619 words against 489,307 for Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte — Complete, a difference of 36,312 words or about 2h 25m of extra reading. Essays of Michel de Montaigne — Complete is the harder read, at grade 18.5 against 11.4.
SOURCE·Project Gutenberg full texts·both editions counted the same way·REVIEWED JUL 2026
Side by side
| Essays of Michel de Montaigne — Complete | Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte — Complete | |
|---|---|---|
| Author | Montaigne, Michel de | Bourrienne, Louis Antoine Fauvelet de |
| Words | 525,619 | 489,307 |
| Reading time at 250 wpm | 35h 02m | 32h 37m |
| Unique words | 25,883 | 19,464 |
| Sentences | 11,932 | 20,726 |
| Average sentence length | 44.1 words | 23.6 words |
| Reading grade | 18.5 | 11.4 |
| Reading ease | 40.7 | 55.6 |
| Long words | 10.3% | 13.3% |
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 = |525,619 − 489,307| = 36,312 words 36,312 ÷ 250 wpm = 2h 25m of extra reading
The second question
Which is longer, Essays of Michel de Montaigne — Complete or Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte — Complete?
Essays of Michel de Montaigne — Complete is longer — 525,619 words against 489,307 for Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte — Complete, a difference of 36,312 words or about 2h 25m of extra reading. Essays of Michel de Montaigne — Complete is the harder read, at grade 18.5 against 11.4.
Colophon
Both figures computed from Project Gutenberg plain-text editions — ebook no. 3600 and no. 3567 — 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.
