An Insular Possession by Timothy Mo
Published 1986 · 632 pages · 158,000 words · about 18 hours at an average pace · Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction
How hard is An Insular Possession to read?
An Insular Possession scores 55 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: 55 out of 100
- 19th-century vocabulary, Chinese terms, period journalism.
- Sentence structure: 55 out of 100
- Elaborate period sentences, epistolary elements.
- Abstraction: 50 out of 100
- Opium Wars and colonialism explored through characters.
- Information density: 60 out of 100
- Dense with Hong Kong founding history.
- Narrative indirection: 55 out of 100
- Period documents and multiple perspectives.
- Symbolic density: 55 out of 100
- Opium, Hong Kong, journalism carry symbolic weight.
- Ironic distance: 55 out of 100
- Mo's satire of colonialism is sustained.
- Resolution withholding: 50 out of 100
- Historical ending known; characters' fates uncertain.
- Structural complexity: 60 out of 100
- Multiple forms: narrative, letters, newspaper articles.
How An Insular Possession is regarded
An Insular Possession holds a literary regard score of 59 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.