Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace
Published 2005 · 352 pages · 90,066 words · about 7 hours at an average pace · Nonfiction, Essays & Criticism
How hard is Consider the Lobster to read?
Consider the Lobster scores 68 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: 76 out of 100
- Wallace deploys words like 'euphuistic,' 'pleonastic,' 'sesquipedalian,' 'Heliogabaline,' 'petitio principii,' 'ignoratio elenchi,' and 'nociceptors' — terms drawn from rhetoric, philosophy, neuroscience, and classical logic. The SNOOT essay alone contains enough specialized linguistic vocabulary to require a dictionary nearby. Context usually clarifies meaning, but the density of rare terms is higher than 2666 and closer to Gravity's Rainbow.
- Sentence structure: 80 out of 100
- Wallace's sentences extend through multiple nested parenthetical insertions, em-dash interruptions, and footnotes that sometimes run longer than the paragraphs they annotate — the private-language demonstration in footnote 32 of 'Authority and American Usage' runs over 1,200 words. The dual-track of main text and footnotes forces the reader to hold two simultaneous arguments. Less extreme than Faulkner's 1,000-word sentences, but more structurally demanding than standard essay prose.
- Abstraction: 82 out of 100
- Essays move without warning between concrete reporting — the AAVNA awards ceremony, lobsters thrashing in supermarket tanks — and sustained philosophical argument about Wittgenstein's private language thesis, Singer's utilitarian framework for animal interests, and the ideological stakes of prescriptivist grammar. The abstraction is not ornamental; it is the point of each essay. Closer to Brothers Karamazov (75) than to journalism, because the philosophical digressions are where the argument lives.
- Information density: 80 out of 100
- The footnote apparatus creates genuine parallel texts rather than mere citation scaffolding. 'Authority and American Usage' embeds a full sociological argument about class and linguistic authority in interpolations labelled 'SEMI-INTERPOLATION' and 'AMATEUR DEVELOPMENTAL-SOCIOLINGUISTIC INTERPOLATION.' Every page requires tracking multiple conceptual threads simultaneously. The density is comparable to War and Peace (80) not because of sheer narrative mass but because each paragraph in the SNOOT essay introduces a new argument rather than developing the previous one.
How Consider the Lobster is regarded
Consider the Lobster holds a literary regard score of 76 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.