Always Coming Home by Ursula K Le Guin
Published 1985 · 546 pages · 184,811 words · about 13 hours at an average pace · Science Fiction
How hard is Always Coming Home to read?
Always Coming Home scores 57 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: 50 out of 100
- Invented culture with new vocabulary and concepts.
- Sentence structure: 50 out of 100
- Varied forms: narrative, poetry, ethnography.
- Abstraction: 60 out of 100
- Utopian thinking about culture and sustainability.
- Information density: 55 out of 100
- Dense ethnographic detail of invented culture.
- Narrative indirection: 60 out of 100
- Fragmented ethnography requires assembly.
- Symbolic density: 60 out of 100
- The Kesh culture becomes symbolic alternative.
- Ironic distance: 45 out of 100
- Le Guin presents with scholarly distance but evident hope.
- Resolution withholding: 55 out of 100
- Not plot-driven; culture exists as possibility.
- Structural complexity: 70 out of 100
- Mixed forms: narrative, songs, maps, essays.
How Always Coming Home is regarded
Always Coming Home holds a literary regard score of 72 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.