Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey
Published 1968 · 272 pages · 70,000 words · about 5 hours at an average pace · Memoir & Autobiography, Nature & Environment, Nonfiction, Science & Nature
How hard is Desert Solitaire to read?
Desert Solitaire scores 24 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: 35 out of 100
- Rich nature vocabulary. Literary but accessible.
- Sentence structure: 35 out of 100
- Abstraction: 32 out of 100
- Concrete observation with philosophical argument.
- Information density: 42 out of 100
- Dense with description, observation, and polemic.
- Narrative indirection: 15 out of 100
- Moves between narrative, description, and argument.
- Symbolic density: 25 out of 100
- The desert as symbol of wildness and freedom.
- Ironic distance: 22 out of 100
- Mordant humor about civilization and its discontents.
- Resolution withholding: 18 out of 100
- Abbey leaves the desert. The wild is always receding.
- Structural complexity: 22 out of 100
- Seasonal structure with thematic digressions.
How Desert Solitaire is regarded
Desert Solitaire holds a literary regard score of 54 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.