I'm Thinking of Ending Things by Iain Reid
Published 2016 · 50,000 words · about 3 hours at an average pace · Horror, Literary Fiction
How hard is I'm Thinking of Ending Things to read?
I'm Thinking of Ending Things scores 60 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: 42 out of 100
- The narrator's literary voice references Pauline Kael, David Foster Wallace, and academic criticism. Vocabulary elevates above typical genre fiction.
- Sentence structure: 40 out of 100
- Abstraction: 60 out of 100
- The novel operates as a puzzle about consciousness, identity, and memory. The abstract framework only becomes visible in retrospect.
- Information density: 50 out of 100
- Dense with literary references, philosophical asides, and embedded clues. The brevity concentrates the information. Rewards rereading.
- Narrative indirection: 80 out of 100
- The entire narrative is a misdirection. The narrator's identity, the timeline, and the nature of the events are all fundamentally unreliable. Nothing is what it first appears.
- Symbolic density: 60 out of 100
- The farmhouse, the snowstorm, the basement, the high school—all function as symbols within a framework that only reveals itself at the ending.
- Ironic distance: 50 out of 100
- The borrowed critical passages and literary references create intellectual distance. The narrator comments on her own narrative with an awareness that turns out to be a different kind of awareness entirely.
- Resolution withholding: 70 out of 100
- The ending provides a resolution, but one that requires the reader to reconstruct the entire novel. Many readers remain uncertain about what actually happened.
- Structural complexity: 65 out of 100
- The narrative appears linear but is revealed as recursive. Interspersed phone calls and the structural collapse in the final act create a puzzle-box architecture.
How I'm Thinking of Ending Things is regarded
I'm Thinking of Ending Things holds a literary regard score of 43 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.