An Orchestra of Minorities by Chigozie Obioma
Published 2019 · 516 pages · 129,000 words · about 14 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction
How hard is An Orchestra of Minorities to read?
An Orchestra of Minorities scores 52 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: 42 out of 100
- Igbo vocabulary and cosmological terms.
- Sentence structure: 50 out of 100
- Chi narrator's elaborate oral style.
- Abstraction: 50 out of 100
- Questions of fate, love, and Igbo cosmology.
- Information density: 50 out of 100
- Dense with Igbo culture and Nigerian reality.
- Narrative indirection: 55 out of 100
- Chi narrator knows past and future; readers learn gradually.
- Symbolic density: 60 out of 100
- The Chi, the birds, Cyprus carry symbolic weight.
- Ironic distance: 45 out of 100
- Obioma writes with compassion within mythic frame.
- Resolution withholding: 50 out of 100
- Fate unfolds as predicted but questions remain.
- Structural complexity: 55 out of 100
- Chi narrator with embedded human story.
How An Orchestra of Minorities is regarded
An Orchestra of Minorities holds a literary regard score of 62 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.