All Things Are Too Small by Becca Rothfeld
Published 2024 · 92,000 words · about 6 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism, Philosophy
How hard is All Things Are Too Small to read?
All Things Are Too Small 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: 52 out of 100
- Rothfeld writes in long, Latinate sentences stocked with terms drawn from philosophy and aesthetics — asceticism, phenomenology, sublimation — but she glosses each one in the sentence that uses it. The vocabulary sits closer to The Great Gatsby's elegant accessibility than to academic prose thick with unexplained jargon.
- Sentence structure: 60 out of 100
- Her sentences pile up subordinate clauses, semicolons, and qualifications the way a lawyer builds a case, often running fifty or sixty words before landing on the verb that matters. It reads closer to the winding hypotaxis of James or Proust than to a plain declarative style, though every sentence still resolves.
- Abstraction: 68 out of 100
- Every essay argues from a concrete provocation — Marie Kondo folding a sweater, a flat sex scene in a prizewinning novel — into sustained philosophical territory: what desire is for, whether asceticism is a form of cowardice, what art owes to excess. The move from anecdote to abstraction happens on nearly every page.
- Information density: 62 out of 100
- A single essay can cite Kant, Simone Weil, the Marquis de Sade, and three contemporary novelists in service of one argument, expecting the reader to hold all of it in view at once. The prose compresses a lot of reference into essay-length pieces without the sprawl of a full monograph.
How All Things Are Too Small is regarded
All Things Are Too Small holds a literary regard score of 38 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.