McGlue by Ottessa Moshfegh
Published 2014 · 35,200 words · about 3 hours at an average pace
How hard is McGlue to read?
McGlue scores 61 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
- Nineteenth-century sailor's vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 62 out of 100
- Broken, lurching sentences that mimic the narrator's state.
- Abstraction: 52 out of 100
- Concrete, though memory is unreliable throughout.
- Information density: 50 out of 100
- Light; a novella.
- Narrative indirection: 82 out of 100
- A narrator with a fractured skull and no reliable memory of the murder he is accused of.
- Symbolic density: 52 out of 100
- The wound and the drink carry the weight.
- Ironic distance: 58 out of 100
- Distance between his account and what emerges.
- Resolution withholding: 68 out of 100
- What happened is only partly recovered.
- Structural complexity: 55 out of 100
- Fragmented memory against a present-day trial.
How McGlue is regarded
McGlue holds a literary regard score of 47 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.