A Reader's Manifesto by B.R. Myers
Published 2002 · 38,000 words · about 2 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism, Literary Criticism, Nonfiction
How hard is A Reader's Manifesto to read?
A Reader's Manifesto scores 36 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: 42 out of 100
- Myers writes plain, witty, journalistic English — deliberately the opposite of the prose he attacks. He quotes purple sentences from Proulx and McCarthy, but his own vocabulary stays accessible, glossing the few descriptive terms (evocative, muscular, spare) he coins. That puts him near The Great Gatsby's accessible register and well below a jargon-heavy theorist.
- Sentence structure: 46 out of 100
- His sentences are controlled and often punchy, built for rhetorical impact rather than subordination — he sets up a celebrated passage, then knocks it down in a short clause. The tangled syntax in the book belongs to the passages he quotes, like McCarthy's chains of 'and,' not to Myers's own clean analysis, which stays more navigable than Fitzgerald's balanced periods.
- Abstraction: 50 out of 100
- The argument stays anchored to specific sentences on the page — he reads a line of DeLillo or Guterson word by word — but rises to broader claims about aesthetic standards, the sociology of book reviewing, and what counts as 'literary.' It demands real conceptual work without ever leaving the concrete text behind, landing near social-observation fiction like Gatsby.
- Information density: 46 out of 100
- A slim, focused polemic that quotes generously and gives each example room, rather than burying the reader in reference. Following it means tracking Myers's readings of Proulx, McCarthy, Auster, DeLillo, and Guterson across five prose 'styles,' plus his running quarrel with named reviewers — demanding but rarely dense.
How A Reader's Manifesto is regarded
A Reader's Manifesto holds a literary regard score of 42 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.