A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
Published 2000 · 120,175 words · about 10 hours at an average pace
How hard is A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius to read?
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius scores 62 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: 58 out of 100
- Contemporary American register with a large working vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 62 out of 100
- Long, digressive, self-interrupting sentences.
- Abstraction: 52 out of 100
- Concrete grief handled through constant abstraction about handling grief.
- Information density: 58 out of 100
- Busy — footnotes, asides, invented dialogue.
- Narrative indirection: 68 out of 100
- The narrator continually tells you how to read him, which makes reading him harder.
- Symbolic density: 45 out of 100
- Comparatively little symbolic layering; the difficulty is in the framing.
- Ironic distance: 85 out of 100
- The whole book is armoured in irony, including its own preface and copyright page.
- Resolution withholding: 50 out of 100
- The emotional question is left deliberately unresolved.
- Structural complexity: 72 out of 100
- Prefaces, appendices and metafictional apparatus wrapped around a plain story.
How A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is regarded
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius holds a literary regard score of 67 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.