Ghostwritten by David Mitchell
Published 1999 · 119,900 words · about 11 hours at an average pace
How hard is Ghostwritten to read?
Ghostwritten scores 64 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: 58 out of 100
- Varied by section; each narrator has a distinct register.
- Sentence structure: 58 out of 100
- Fluent and readable within each section.
- Abstraction: 55 out of 100
- Concrete stories tied together by an abstract idea about causation.
- Information density: 62 out of 100
- Nine settings, nine casts, and a great deal of local detail.
- Narrative indirection: 68 out of 100
- Nine narrators, some of them not human, each seeing only their own fragment.
- Symbolic density: 55 out of 100
- Recurring objects and phrases carry the connections the plot never states.
- Ironic distance: 55 out of 100
- Varies by voice; several narrators are comic without knowing it.
- Resolution withholding: 68 out of 100
- The links between sections are left for the reader to assemble.
- Structural complexity: 85 out of 100
- Nine loosely joined novellas that close into a loop.
How Ghostwritten is regarded
Ghostwritten holds a literary regard score of 61 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.