Mostly Dead Things by Kristen Arnett
Published 2019 · 99,550 words · about 7 hours at an average pace
How hard is Mostly Dead Things to read?
Mostly Dead Things scores 51 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: 45 out of 100
- Plain Florida vocabulary with taxidermy terms.
- Sentence structure: 45 out of 100
- Short, dry sentences.
- Abstraction: 45 out of 100
- Concrete grief handled through the workshop.
- Information density: 50 out of 100
- Moderate.
- Narrative indirection: 52 out of 100
- A narrator avoiding the thing she is narrating.
- Symbolic density: 58 out of 100
- The taxidermy is the governing figure.
- Ironic distance: 55 out of 100
- Comic distance from her own grief.
- Resolution withholding: 55 out of 100
- The family reaches an accommodation, not a resolution.
- Structural complexity: 48 out of 100
- Present-day with flashback.
How Mostly Dead Things is regarded
Mostly Dead Things 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.