Lark Ascending by Silas House
Published 1982 · 51,975 words · about 3 hours at an average pace
How hard is Lark Ascending to read?
Lark Ascending scores 45 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. 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: 45 out of 100
- Plain, with some period and place vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 48 out of 100
- Clear, unhurried sentences.
- Abstraction: 48 out of 100
- Concrete survival with an ecological argument underneath.
- Information density: 48 out of 100
- Moderate world-building.
- Narrative indirection: 42 out of 100
- A first-person survivor recounting after the fact.
- Symbolic density: 55 out of 100
- The dog, the fire and the ruined landscape carry sustained weight.
- Ironic distance: 32 out of 100
- Little irony; the tone is elegiac.
- Resolution withholding: 48 out of 100
- The ending closes the journey but not the world.
- Structural complexity: 40 out of 100
- Linear, with inserted memory.
How Lark Ascending is regarded
Lark Ascending holds a literary regard score of 39 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.