Arabian Sands by Wilfred Thesiger
Published 1959 · 90,000 words · about 6 hours at an average pace · History, Memoir & Autobiography, Nonfiction, Travel & Food
How hard is Arabian Sands to read?
Arabian Sands scores 19 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: 28 out of 100
- Arabic terms and desert geography. Contextually clear.
- Sentence structure: 28 out of 100
- Abstraction: 20 out of 100
- Concrete. Sand, water, camels, companions.
- Information density: 45 out of 100
- Rich in ethnographic and geographic detail.
- Narrative indirection: 80 out of 100
- Chronological expedition narrative.
- Symbolic density: 18 out of 100
- The desert as spiritual landscape. The Empty Quarter as test.
- Ironic distance: 100 out of 100
- Sincere admiration for Bedouin life. Restrained tone.
- Resolution withholding: 15 out of 100
- Thesiger knows this world is ending. Elegiac unresolution.
- Structural complexity: 18 out of 100
- Two crossings. Chronological and clear.
How Arabian Sands is regarded
Arabian Sands holds a literary regard score of 56 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.