Building Stories by Chris Ware
Published 2012 · 60,000 words · about 4 hours at an average pace · Graphic Novel, Literary Fiction, Experimental Fiction
How hard is Building Stories to read?
Building Stories scores 51 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: 30 out of 100
- Simple, everyday vocabulary that mirrors the ordinary lives depicted. The complexity is visual and structural, not linguistic.
- Sentence structure: 25 out of 100
- Short, often fragmentary sentences that capture interior monologue. The syntax mimics the hesitant, self-doubting quality of the characters' thoughts.
- Abstraction: 40 out of 100
- The themes of loneliness and unfulfilled potential are universal abstractions, but they are conveyed through utterly specific, concrete domestic detail.
- Information density: 55 out of 100
- Ware's tiny panels and elaborate page layouts pack enormous amounts of visual and narrative information into every surface. The multiple formats multiply the density.
- Narrative indirection: 65 out of 100
- No prescribed reading order across fourteen separate objects. Within each piece, time shifts freely between past and present. The narrative must be assembled by the reader.
- Symbolic density: 50 out of 100
- The building itself as a metaphor for lives stacked together but separate. The bee as a counterpoint to human existence. The prosthetic leg. The flower shop. Symbols are embedded in the architecture of the pages.
- Ironic distance: 35 out of 100
- Ware's formal precision creates a kind of distance, but the emotional content is painfully sincere. The irony is structural — the gap between the elaborate form and the small, sad lives it depicts.
- Resolution withholding: 55 out of 100
- No prescribed reading order means no definitive resolution. The pieces provide different perspectives on the same lives without converging on a single conclusion.
- Structural complexity: 80 out of 100
- Fourteen separate printed objects with no prescribed reading order, each with its own format and internal structure. One of the most structurally complex narrative works ever created.
How Building Stories is regarded
Building Stories holds a literary regard score of 74 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.