Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott
Published 1994 · 240 pages · 55,000 words · about 4 hours at an average pace · Business & Self-Help, Media & Technology, Nonfiction, Satire & Humor
How hard is Bird by Bird to read?
Bird by Bird scores 15 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: 20 out of 100
- Conversational and accessible.
- Sentence structure: 22 out of 100
- Abstraction: 22 out of 100
- Concrete advice with personal anecdotes.
- Information density: 32 out of 100
- Light. Story-driven rather than data-driven.
- Narrative indirection: 100 out of 100
- Straightforward chapter structure.
- Symbolic density: 12 out of 100
- The bird-by-bird metaphor and a few others.
- Ironic distance: 15 out of 100
- Self-deprecating humor throughout.
- Resolution withholding: 50 out of 100
- Each chapter delivers its point clearly.
- Structural complexity: 12 out of 100
- Simple topical chapters.
How Bird by Bird is regarded
Bird by Bird holds a literary regard score of 42 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.