Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart by Joyce Carol Oates
Published 1990 · 422 pages · 110,159 words · about 7 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction
How hard is Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart to read?
Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart scores 50 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: 40 out of 100
- Oates's characteristic vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 48 out of 100
- Long, immersive sentences.
- Abstraction: 50 out of 100
- Race, violence, and America explored.
- Information density: 50 out of 100
- Dense with 1950s American detail.
- Narrative indirection: 50 out of 100
- Multiple perspectives and time.
- Symbolic density: 55 out of 100
- The heart, the secret, race carry weight.
- Ironic distance: 45 out of 100
- Oates writes with moral seriousness.
- Resolution withholding: 55 out of 100
- Secret persists; lives continue.
- Structural complexity: 50 out of 100
- Dual protagonists across decades.
How Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart is regarded
Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart holds a literary regard score of 69 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.