Apeirogon by Colum McCann
Published 2020 · 496 pages · 124,000 words · about 14 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction
How hard is Apeirogon to read?
Apeirogon scores 54 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
- Political, historical, and artistic vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 50 out of 100
- Fragmented structure with varied sentence styles.
- Abstraction: 55 out of 100
- Questions of grief, peace, and Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
- Information density: 55 out of 100
- Dense with historical and political detail.
- Narrative indirection: 60 out of 100
- Fragmented structure requires active assembly.
- Symbolic density: 60 out of 100
- The apeirogon, the daughters, peace carry heavy weight.
- Ironic distance: 40 out of 100
- McCann writes with evident moral engagement.
- Resolution withholding: 55 out of 100
- Grief and hope continue; peace elusive.
- Structural complexity: 65 out of 100
- 1001 numbered sections forming infinite polygon.
How Apeirogon is regarded
Apeirogon holds a literary regard score of 57 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.