Lives of the Saints by Nancy Lemann
Published 1894 · 111,650 words · about 8 hours at an average pace
How hard is Lives of the Saints to read?
Lives of the Saints scores 55 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: 50 out of 100
- Southern vernacular, comic and mannered.
- Sentence structure: 52 out of 100
- Loose, digressive sentences.
- Abstraction: 48 out of 100
- Concrete New Orleans, elegiac in register.
- Information density: 48 out of 100
- Light on plot.
- Narrative indirection: 62 out of 100
- A narrator who reports catastrophe as social comedy.
- Symbolic density: 48 out of 100
- The city and the trial carry weight.
- Ironic distance: 68 out of 100
- Sustained comic distance from real grief.
- Resolution withholding: 62 out of 100
- It drifts to a close.
- Structural complexity: 48 out of 100
- Episodic, with little plot.
How Lives of the Saints is regarded
Lives of the Saints holds a literary regard score of 36 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.