Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney
Published 2017 · 336 pages · 68,000 words · about 5 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Romance
How hard is Conversations with Friends to read?
Conversations with Friends scores 23 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: 25 out of 100
- Political and literary vocabulary. Intellectual characters.
- Sentence structure: 25 out of 100
- Abstraction: 28 out of 100
- Characters intellectualize their relationships. Political theory as lens.
- Information density: 28 out of 100
- Moderate. The spare style conveys density through implication.
- Narrative indirection: 25 out of 100
- Frances's self-deceptions require the reader to read between the lines.
- Symbolic density: 15 out of 100
- Minimal. The power is in social observation.
- Ironic distance: 22 out of 100
- Frances's political convictions ironized by her behavior.
- Resolution withholding: 25 out of 100
- Open ending. Relationships unresolved.
- Structural complexity: 18 out of 100
- Linear first-person narration.
How Conversations with Friends is regarded
Conversations with Friends holds a literary regard score of 37 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.