Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic vs Creative Evolution
Both counted from their full texts, the same way, on the same day.
885words between them — 4 min of it
Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic is longer — 133,201 words against 132,316 for Creative Evolution, a difference of 885 words or about 4 min of extra reading. Creative Evolution is the harder read, at grade 14.4 against 10.7.
SOURCE·Project Gutenberg full texts·both editions counted the same way·REVIEWED JUL 2026
Side by side
| Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic | Creative Evolution | |
|---|---|---|
| Author | Weaver, Raymond M. (Raymond Melbourne) | Bergson, Henri |
| Words | 133,201 | 132,316 |
| Reading time at 250 wpm | 8h 53m | 8h 49m |
| Unique words | 15,726 | 7,725 |
| Sentences | 6,109 | 4,642 |
| Average sentence length | 21.8 words | 28.5 words |
| Reading grade | 10.7 | 14.4 |
| Reading ease | 57.2 | 42.4 |
| Long words | 12.9% | 17% |
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 = |133,201 − 132,316| = 885 words 885 ÷ 250 wpm = 4 min of extra reading
The second question
Which is longer, Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic or Creative Evolution?
Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic is longer — 133,201 words against 132,316 for Creative Evolution, a difference of 885 words or about 4 min of extra reading. Creative Evolution is the harder read, at grade 14.4 against 10.7.
Colophon
Both figures computed from Project Gutenberg plain-text editions — ebook no. 50461 and no. 26163 — 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.
