Blackouts by Justin Torres
Published 2023 · 304 pages · 76,000 words · about 8 hours at an average pace · Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction
How hard is Blackouts to read?
Blackouts scores 62 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. 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: 50 out of 100
- Archival and queer historical vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 55 out of 100
- Varied, experimental sentences.
- Abstraction: 60 out of 100
- Memory, erasure, and queer history.
- Information density: 60 out of 100
- Dense with archival material.
- Narrative indirection: 65 out of 100
- Redactions create meaning through absence.
- Symbolic density: 65 out of 100
- The redactions themselves are symbolic.
- Ironic distance: 55 out of 100
- Torres maintains archival distance.
- Resolution withholding: 65 out of 100
- Erasure prevents resolution.
- Structural complexity: 70 out of 100
- Incorporates redacted historical text.
How Blackouts is regarded
Blackouts holds a literary regard score of 61 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.