Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder
Published 2010 · 640 pages · 150,000 words · about 10 hours at an average pace · History, Nonfiction
How hard is Bloodlands to read?
Bloodlands scores 29 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: 35 out of 100
- Eastern European names and Soviet/Nazi terminology.
- Sentence structure: 35 out of 100
- Abstraction: 40 out of 100
- Historical analysis with sustained moral argument.
- Information density: 58 out of 100
- Dense with statistics, individual stories, and policy analysis.
- Narrative indirection: 15 out of 100
- Chronological and geographical organization. Direct argumentation.
- Symbolic density: 15 out of 100
- The bloodlands territory functions symbolically. Otherwise analytical history.
- Ironic distance: 100 out of 100
- Snyder writes with moral seriousness. No irony in the face of mass death.
- Resolution withholding: 15 out of 100
- The moral questions raised by mass death resist resolution.
- Structural complexity: 30 out of 100
- Chronological chapters covering overlapping Nazi and Soviet crimes.
How Bloodlands is regarded
Bloodlands holds a literary regard score of 56 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.