I Do Everything I'm Told by Megan Fernandes
Published 2023
How hard is I Do Everything I'm Told to read?
I Do Everything I'm Told scores 58 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: 55 out of 100
- Contemporary and allusive by turns.
- Sentence structure: 58 out of 100
- Varied line and sentence lengths, some prose poems.
- Abstraction: 62 out of 100
- Travel and desire pushed toward abstraction.
- Information density: 52 out of 100
- Compressed, as poetry is.
- Narrative indirection: 55 out of 100
- A speaker close to the poet but not identical.
- Symbolic density: 68 out of 100
- Cities and animals carry sustained figurative weight.
- Ironic distance: 55 out of 100
- Frequent self-aware turns against the poem's own feeling.
- Resolution withholding: 62 out of 100
- Poems end on turns rather than conclusions.
- Structural complexity: 50 out of 100
- A sequence with recurring motifs rather than a narrative.
How I Do Everything I'm Told is regarded
I Do Everything I'm Told holds a literary regard score of 33 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.