Euphoria by Lily King
Published 2014 · 77,000 words · about 5 hours at an average pace
How hard is Euphoria to read?
Euphoria scores 53 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: 52 out of 100
- Clear, with ethnographic vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 52 out of 100
- Well-made sentences of ordinary length.
- Abstraction: 50 out of 100
- Concrete fieldwork carrying ideas about knowledge and desire.
- Information density: 58 out of 100
- Steady period and anthropological detail.
- Narrative indirection: 55 out of 100
- Shifting narration, including field notes, none of it complete.
- Symbolic density: 52 out of 100
- The river and the grid diagram do real symbolic work.
- Ironic distance: 48 out of 100
- Some distance between what the narrators claim and what they want.
- Resolution withholding: 55 out of 100
- The ending is abrupt and leaves the consequences hanging.
- Structural complexity: 55 out of 100
- Alternating voices and documents across two timeframes.
How Euphoria is regarded
Euphoria holds a literary regard score of 48 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.