Dead Wake by Erik Larson
Published 2015 · 105,000 words · about 7 hours at an average pace · History, Journalism & Reportage, Nonfiction
How hard is Dead Wake to read?
Dead Wake 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: 28 out of 100
- Maritime and military terminology. Accessible.
- Sentence structure: 28 out of 100
- Abstraction: 22 out of 100
- Concrete historical narrative.
- Information density: 45 out of 100
- Dense with historical and maritime detail.
- Narrative indirection: 18 out of 100
- Multiple converging storylines building to the torpedo.
- Symbolic density: 15 out of 100
- The ship as symbol of prewar innocence.
- Ironic distance: 18 out of 100
- Dramatic irony—the reader knows what the passengers do not.
- Resolution withholding: 20 out of 100
- The torpedo strike delayed until deep into the book.
- Structural complexity: 25 out of 100
- Multiple POVs converging on a single catastrophe.
How Dead Wake is regarded
Dead Wake holds a literary regard score of 42 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.