Crush by Richard Siken
Published 2004 · 22,000 words · about 2 hours at an average pace
How hard is Crush to read?
Crush scores 65 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: 45 out of 100
- Plain, urgent, deliberately restricted vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 58 out of 100
- Broken lines, repetition, sentences that restart mid-thought.
- Abstraction: 68 out of 100
- Desire and violence pushed into pure figure.
- Information density: 58 out of 100
- Compressed; the repetition carries meaning.
- Narrative indirection: 68 out of 100
- A speaker whose account keeps contradicting itself.
- Symbolic density: 75 out of 100
- The car, the road and the two men are sustained figures rather than scenes.
- Ironic distance: 55 out of 100
- Distance between the speaker's declarations and his terror.
- Resolution withholding: 78 out of 100
- The poems refuse closure as their method.
- Structural complexity: 68 out of 100
- A sequence in which the same scene recurs, altered.
How Crush is regarded
Crush holds a literary regard score of 61 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.