Ghost World by Daniel Clowes
Published 1997 · 271 pages · 8,000 words · about 1 hour at an average pace · Graphic Novel, Literary Fiction
How hard is Ghost World to read?
Ghost World scores 28 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: 18 out of 100
- Colloquial teenage dialogue. No specialized vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 15 out of 100
- Abstraction: 20 out of 100
- Concrete and specific. Themes of alienation emerge through behavior.
- Information density: 28 out of 100
- Sparse text. Emotional and social information carried by art and subtext.
- Narrative indirection: 30 out of 100
- No conventional plot. The narrative is about drift and dissolution.
- Symbolic density: 28 out of 100
- The ghost world is both literal suburban emptiness and existential condition.
- Ironic distance: 45 out of 100
- Enid's irony is her defining trait, and Clowes views her with ironic affection.
- Resolution withholding: 35 out of 100
- No resolution. Enid boards a bus. Nothing is settled.
- Structural complexity: 20 out of 100
- Episodic vignettes building to a quiet dissolution. Simple but effective.
How Ghost World is regarded
Ghost World holds a literary regard score of 56 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.