A Hologram for the King by Dave Eggers
Published 2012 · 268 pages · 67,000 words · about 4 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction
How hard is A Hologram for the King to read?
A Hologram for the King scores 42 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: 32 out of 100
- Clean contemporary prose with Saudi and business vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 35 out of 100
- Clear sentences matching Alan's bewildered state.
- Abstraction: 45 out of 100
- Questions of American decline and global change.
- Information density: 38 out of 100
- Spare novel efficiently conveying displacement.
- Narrative indirection: 45 out of 100
- Eggers implies more than he states about American condition.
- Symbolic density: 50 out of 100
- The hologram, the waiting, the lump become symbolic.
- Ironic distance: 45 out of 100
- Eggers maintains wry distance from Alan's failures.
- Resolution withholding: 50 out of 100
- Personal resolution but larger questions remain.
- Structural complexity: 30 out of 100
- Straightforward narrative of waiting.
How A Hologram for the King is regarded
A Hologram for the King holds a literary regard score of 53 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.