Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt
Published 1994 · 110,000 words · about 7 hours at an average pace · Journalism & Reportage, Mystery & Crime, Nonfiction, Southern & Regional American Fiction
How hard is Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil to read?
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil scores 21 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: 25 out of 100
- Rich but accessible vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 28 out of 100
- Abstraction: 20 out of 100
- Concrete, character-driven narrative.
- Information density: 42 out of 100
- Entertaining density. Character and atmosphere rich.
- Narrative indirection: 18 out of 100
- Digressive, portrait-style structure around a murder trial.
- Symbolic density: 18 out of 100
- Savannah itself as symbol of beauty and decay.
- Ironic distance: 18 out of 100
- Bemused outsider observing Southern eccentricity.
- Resolution withholding: 15 out of 100
- Multiple trials delay the verdict.
- Structural complexity: 22 out of 100
- Loosely chronological with extensive digressions.
How Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is regarded
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil holds a literary regard score of 41 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.