A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain by Robert Olen Butler
Published 1993 · 268 pages · 67,000 words · about 4 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Short Fiction
How hard is A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain to read?
A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain scores 43 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. 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: 35 out of 100
- Clear prose with Vietnamese vocabulary and cultural references.
- Sentence structure: 38 out of 100
- Controlled, meditative sentences varying by narrator.
- Abstraction: 45 out of 100
- Questions of exile, memory, and cultural displacement.
- Information density: 40 out of 100
- Each story efficiently establishes world and character.
- Narrative indirection: 50 out of 100
- Stories imply rather than state themes of loss and adaptation.
- Symbolic density: 50 out of 100
- Vietnam, scent, ghosts carry symbolic weight.
- Ironic distance: 40 out of 100
- Butler writes with evident sympathy for Vietnamese voices.
- Resolution withholding: 45 out of 100
- Stories resolve individually; exile continues.
- Structural complexity: 40 out of 100
- Linked stories with recurring themes and community.
How A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain is regarded
A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain holds a literary regard score of 64 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.