Essays by Michel de Montaigne
Published 1580 · 200 pages · 519,348 words · about 34 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism, Nonfiction, Philosophy
How hard is Essays to read?
Essays scores 48 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. 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: 42 out of 100
- Renaissance literary vocabulary in translation.
- Sentence structure: 42 out of 100
- Abstraction: 45 out of 100
- Philosophical reflection grounded in personal experience.
- Information density: 52 out of 100
- Dense with classical references, personal observation, and argument.
- Narrative indirection: 30 out of 100
- Deliberately digressive. Essays circle their subjects.
- Symbolic density: 18 out of 100
- Classical allusions and personal symbols.
- Ironic distance: 25 out of 100
- Montaigne's skeptical self-awareness.
- Resolution withholding: 22 out of 100
- Montaigne resists conclusions. The essay as open form.
- Structural complexity: 30 out of 100
- 107 essays of varying length organized in three books.
How Essays is regarded
Essays holds a literary regard score of 89 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.