Breakfast on Pluto by Patrick McCabe
Published 1998 · 199 pages · 50,500 words · about 3 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction
How hard is Breakfast on Pluto to read?
Breakfast on Pluto scores 50 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: 45 out of 100
- Irish and 1970s London vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 48 out of 100
- Camp, episodic sentences.
- Abstraction: 50 out of 100
- Identity, belonging, and Irish Troubles.
- Information density: 50 out of 100
- Dense with 1970s detail.
- Narrative indirection: 50 out of 100
- Camp deflects trauma.
- Symbolic density: 50 out of 100
- Mother, glamour carry weight.
- Ironic distance: 55 out of 100
- McCabe maintains camp distance.
- Resolution withholding: 50 out of 100
- Search continues.
- Structural complexity: 50 out of 100
- Episodic chapters with frame.
How Breakfast on Pluto is regarded
Breakfast on Pluto holds a literary regard score of 58 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.