Liar's Poker by Michael Lewis
Published 1989 · 384 pages · 75,000 words · about 5 hours at an average pace · Business & Self-Help, Memoir & Autobiography, Nonfiction
How hard is Liar's Poker to read?
Liar's Poker scores 20 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: 30 out of 100
- Bond market terminology. Some finance jargon.
- Sentence structure: 25 out of 100
- Abstraction: 25 out of 100
- Financial concepts through personal narrative.
- Information density: 42 out of 100
- Dense with Wall Street detail and anecdote.
- Narrative indirection: 100 out of 100
- Chronological memoir with industry context.
- Symbolic density: 12 out of 100
- The trading floor as microcosm of American greed.
- Ironic distance: 22 out of 100
- Detached, self-aware humor about absurd excess.
- Resolution withholding: 100 out of 100
- Lewis leaves Wall Street. The culture persists.
- Structural complexity: 20 out of 100
- Chronological memoir. Clear three-act structure.
How Liar's Poker is regarded
Liar's Poker holds a literary regard score of 51 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.