The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Published 2007 · 110,000 words · about 7 hours at an average pace · Nonfiction, Philosophy, Politics & Society, Science & Nature
How hard is The Black Swan to read?
The Black Swan scores 35 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: 38 out of 100
- Statistical, philosophical, and financial vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 35 out of 100
- Abstraction: 45 out of 100
- Epistemological argument about uncertainty.
- Information density: 50 out of 100
- Dense with ideas, anecdotes, and mathematical argument.
- Narrative indirection: 18 out of 100
- Discursive structure with autobiographical digressions.
- Symbolic density: 18 out of 100
- The Black Swan as metaphor for the unknowable.
- Ironic distance: 22 out of 100
- Aggressive irony toward experts and forecasters.
- Resolution withholding: 15 out of 100
- The point is that resolution is impossible.
- Structural complexity: 25 out of 100
- Three parts with digressive essays.
How The Black Swan is regarded
The Black Swan 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.