Cherry by Nico Walker
Published 1980 · 8,800 words · about 1 hour at an average pace
How hard is Cherry to read?
Cherry 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: 42 out of 100
- Flat soldier's vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 45 out of 100
- Short, affectless sentences.
- Abstraction: 42 out of 100
- Concrete throughout.
- Information density: 48 out of 100
- Moderate.
- Narrative indirection: 62 out of 100
- A narrator who reports atrocity and addiction in the same register.
- Symbolic density: 45 out of 100
- Restrained; the flatness is the method.
- Ironic distance: 58 out of 100
- Distance between the tone and the events.
- Resolution withholding: 55 out of 100
- It ends without redemption.
- Structural complexity: 48 out of 100
- Linear across war and after.
How Cherry is regarded
Cherry holds a literary regard score of 34 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.