Exciting Times by Naoise Dolan
Published 2020 · 240 pages · 68,000 words · about 5 hours at an average pace · LGBTQ+ Fiction, Literary Fiction
How hard is Exciting Times to read?
Exciting Times scores 27 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: 25 out of 100
- Precise vocabulary reflecting Ava's education. Financial and linguistic terminology.
- Sentence structure: 30 out of 100
- Abstraction: 28 out of 100
- Ava intellectualizes her emotions. Class and power analyzed through relationship dynamics.
- Information density: 35 out of 100
- Lean novel. Dense with social observation about expat economics and language politics.
- Narrative indirection: 25 out of 100
- Three-part structure. Ava's emotional truth emerges through what she does not say directly.
- Symbolic density: 18 out of 100
- English as colonial currency. Julian's apartment as borrowed luxury. Minimal overt symbolism.
- Ironic distance: 40 out of 100
- Ava is relentlessly self-aware and ironically detached. Sincerity is the thing she cannot access.
- Resolution withholding: 25 out of 100
- The triangle resolves, but Ava's emotional growth is understated and ambiguous.
- Structural complexity: 20 out of 100
- Clean three-part structure: Julian, Edith, Both.
How Exciting Times is regarded
Exciting Times holds a literary regard score of 34 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.