Cod by Mark Kurlansky
Published 1997 · 48 pages · 75,000 words · about 5 hours at an average pace · History, Nonfiction, Science & Nature, Travel & Food
How hard is Cod to read?
Cod scores 20 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: 28 out of 100
- Accessible popular history. Fishing and maritime terminology.
- Sentence structure: 28 out of 100
- Abstraction: 28 out of 100
- Concrete history of a single species and its human impact.
- Information density: 48 out of 100
- Dense with maritime history, ecology, recipes, and economics.
- Narrative indirection: 15 out of 100
- Chronological with thematic connections.
- Symbolic density: 15 out of 100
- Cod as a symbol of abundance and its loss.
- Ironic distance: 15 out of 100
- The irony of destroying what sustains you provides the book's emotional core.
- Resolution withholding: 100 out of 100
- The collapse of the cod fishery provides devastating resolution.
- Structural complexity: 20 out of 100
- Chronological with thematic chapters.
How Cod is regarded
Cod holds a literary regard score of 41 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.