Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks
Published 2007 · 448 pages · 110,000 words · about 7 hours at an average pace · Arts & Culture, Nonfiction, Science & Nature
How hard is Musicophilia to read?
Musicophilia scores 27 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: 38 out of 100
- Neurological and musical terminology.
- Sentence structure: 32 out of 100
- Abstraction: 35 out of 100
- Neuroscience concepts grounded in individual cases.
- Information density: 48 out of 100
- Dense with case studies and neurological detail.
- Narrative indirection: 100 out of 100
- Case study format. Direct.
- Symbolic density: 15 out of 100
- Music as window into brain function.
- Ironic distance: 80 out of 100
- Warm, compassionate tone.
- Resolution withholding: 12 out of 100
- Many cases have no cure. Open-ended.
- Structural complexity: 28 out of 100
- Four parts organizing case studies thematically.
How Musicophilia is regarded
Musicophilia holds a literary regard score of 51 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.