A Congress of Wonders by Ed McClanahan
Published 1996 · 44,275 words · about 3 hours at an average pace
How hard is A Congress of Wonders to read?
A Congress of Wonders scores 52 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. 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: 48 out of 100
- Kentucky vernacular, rich and comic.
- Sentence structure: 50 out of 100
- Loose, digressive sentences.
- Abstraction: 45 out of 100
- Concrete tall tales.
- Information density: 48 out of 100
- Moderate.
- Narrative indirection: 55 out of 100
- Narrators who embroider freely.
- Symbolic density: 48 out of 100
- The carnival carries modest weight.
- Ironic distance: 68 out of 100
- Sustained comic exaggeration.
- Resolution withholding: 48 out of 100
- Stories end on punchlines.
- Structural complexity: 48 out of 100
- Three linked novellas.
How A Congress of Wonders is regarded
A Congress of Wonders holds a literary regard score of 30 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.