Being Mortal by Atul Gawande
Published 2014 · 80,000 words · about 5 hours at an average pace · Health & Medicine, Memoir & Autobiography, Nonfiction, Philosophy
How hard is Being Mortal to read?
Being Mortal scores 21 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
- Medical terminology used sparingly and explained clearly.
- Sentence structure: 28 out of 100
- Abstraction: 30 out of 100
- Philosophical questions anchored in clinical stories.
- Information density: 45 out of 100
- Dense with medical case studies and research.
- Narrative indirection: 12 out of 100
- Weaves between patient stories and systemic critique.
- Symbolic density: 15 out of 100
- The nursing home parakeets as symbols of life amid death.
- Ironic distance: 15 out of 100
- Medicine's war on death as the source of needless suffering.
- Resolution withholding: 18 out of 100
- The problem of mortality admits no resolution.
- Structural complexity: 22 out of 100
- Eight chapters building from systemic critique to personal loss.
How Being Mortal is regarded
Being Mortal holds a literary regard score of 53 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.