A Ship Made of Paper by Scott Spencer
Published 2003 · 388 pages · 88,000 words · about 7 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction
How hard is A Ship Made of Paper to read?
A Ship Made of Paper scores 46 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: 38 out of 100
- Clear contemporary prose with literary references.
- Sentence structure: 42 out of 100
- Flowing sentences following consciousness.
- Abstraction: 45 out of 100
- Questions of desire, race, and self-destruction.
- Information density: 45 out of 100
- Hudson Valley detail and psychological depth.
- Narrative indirection: 50 out of 100
- Multiple perspectives on same affair.
- Symbolic density: 50 out of 100
- The ship, the affair, 9/11 carry thematic weight.
- Ironic distance: 45 out of 100
- Spencer maintains complex sympathy for flawed characters.
- Resolution withholding: 50 out of 100
- Affair ends but consequences continue.
- Structural complexity: 45 out of 100
- Multiple perspectives on affair and aftermath.
How A Ship Made of Paper is regarded
A Ship Made of Paper holds a literary regard score of 60 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.