Following the Equator by Mark Twain
Published 1897 · 384 pages · 140,000 words · about 9 hours at an average pace · Travel, Nonfiction, Humor
How hard is Following the Equator to read?
Following the Equator 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: 42 out of 100
- Twain's accessible prose with geographical and cultural vocabulary from multiple continents.
- Sentence structure: 38 out of 100
- Conversational style consistent with Twain's other travel books, though the tone is more subdued.
- Abstraction: 40 out of 100
- More politically and morally reflective than Twain's earlier travel writing, with sustained arguments about imperialism.
- Information density: 40 out of 100
- Dense with historical, geographical, and political detail from four continents.
- Narrative indirection: 18 out of 100
- First-person chronological travel narrative following the lecture tour itinerary.
- Symbolic density: 25 out of 100
- The equatorial journey carries some symbolic weight as a circuit of imperial exploitation, but Twain is direct.
- Ironic distance: 48 out of 100
- Twain's irony is more bitter here than in earlier travel books, particularly when describing colonial atrocities.
- Resolution withholding: 100 out of 100
- Travel memoir with no plot; the journey ends, the debts are paid.
- Structural complexity: 20 out of 100
- Chronological itinerary with chapter-length episodes and Pudd'nhead Wilson aphorisms as epigraphs.
How Following the Equator is regarded
Following the Equator holds a literary regard score of 59 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.