Barkskins by Annie Proulx
Published 2016 · 848 pages · 180,000 words · about 12 hours at an average pace · Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction, Nature & Environment
How hard is Barkskins to read?
Barkskins scores 47 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. 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: 60 out of 100
- Archaic and period-specific vocabulary. Timbering jargon. Mi'kmaq and French terms. Botanical and ecological terminology.
- Sentence structure: 55 out of 100
- Abstraction: 45 out of 100
- Historical sweep requires the reader to think in centuries. Environmental argument embedded in genealogy.
- Information density: 65 out of 100
- Extremely dense. Three centuries of forestry, indigenous history, economic development, and family genealogy.
- Narrative indirection: 42 out of 100
- Generational structure means characters appear briefly. The reader must track lineages across centuries.
- Symbolic density: 50 out of 100
- The forest as civilization, as capital, as victim. Axes and saws as the tools of colonial extraction.
- Ironic distance: 35 out of 100
- The Duquet dynasty's pride in their enterprise is undercut by the reader's awareness of its consequences.
- Resolution withholding: 30 out of 100
- The novel's endpoint is the present. The question—is it too late?—is left to the reader.
- Structural complexity: 55 out of 100
- Thirteen generations across two family lines spanning three centuries. Massive genealogical architecture.
How Barkskins is regarded
Barkskins 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.