Moonwalk by Michael Jackson
Published 1988 · 283 pages · 77,825 words · about 3 hours at an average pace · Memoir & Autobiography, Biography
How hard is Moonwalk to read?
Moonwalk scores 17 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: 22 out of 100
- Jackson writes in plain, conversational English with music-industry terms explained as they come up. It sits close to the simple contemporary voice of It Ends with Us, and well below literary fiction.
- Sentence structure: 24 out of 100
- Sentences are short and direct, with anecdotes told in simple chronological order. Syntax is as accessible as Anne Frank's diary.
- Abstraction: 25 out of 100
- The book stays with concrete events: rehearsals, tours, recording sessions, the Motown 25 show. Reflections on fame and loneliness stay personal rather than theoretical.
- Information density: 28 out of 100
- A light stream of career milestones, names and anecdotes, with plenty of room between them. It reads easily, closer to Beach Read in pace than to a dense history.
How Moonwalk is regarded
Moonwalk holds a literary regard score of 35 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.