Apropos of Nothing
Published 2020 · 392 pages · 107,800 words · about 5 hours at an average pace · Memoir & Autobiography, Nonfiction
How hard is Apropos of Nothing to read?
Apropos of Nothing scores 23 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it relatively accessible. 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: 30 out of 100
- A comic memoir by a humorist is written in a conversational register. Expect plain, accessible language closer to Beach Read than to the ornate prose of Lolita.
- Sentence structure: 32 out of 100
- Memoir prose for a general readership favors direct sentences and spoken rhythms. It sits near the accessible contemporary end, comparable to Beach Read.
- Abstraction: 30 out of 100
- The book recounts a life, covering childhood, film, theater and relationships, so its content stays concrete and anecdotal. It resembles Atomic Habits in grounding ideas in examples, with less theory.
- Information density: 40 out of 100
- At about 107,800 words, it covers a long career across film, theater, television, print and standup. Names and events accumulate, but the memoir form keeps the pace comfortable.
How Apropos of Nothing is regarded
Apropos of Nothing holds a literary regard score of 26 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.