The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene
Published 1998 · 140,000 words · about 9 hours at an average pace · Business & Self-Help, History, Nonfiction, Psychology
How hard is The 48 Laws of Power to read?
The 48 Laws of Power scores 18 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it relatively accessible. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 28 out of 100
- Historical vocabulary. Elegant but accessible.
- Sentence structure: 28 out of 100
- Abstraction: 28 out of 100
- General principles illustrated with specific examples.
- Information density: 45 out of 100
- Dense with historical anecdotes.
- Narrative indirection: 80 out of 100
- Law-by-law structure. Self-contained entries.
- Symbolic density: 12 out of 100
- Power as a game with universal rules.
- Ironic distance: 18 out of 100
- Amoral, observational detachment.
- Resolution withholding: 50 out of 100
- Each law is clearly stated and illustrated.
- Structural complexity: 15 out of 100
- Forty-eight parallel-structured chapters.
How The 48 Laws of Power is regarded
The 48 Laws of Power holds a literary regard score of 36 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.