No New Things by Ashlee Piper
Published 2025 · 290 pages · 79,750 words · about 4 hours at an average pace · Self-Help, Nonfiction
How hard is No New Things to read?
No New Things scores 19 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: 26 out of 100
- Piper writes a mainstream self-help book in plain consumer language, with everyday terms about shopping, debt and clutter. It sits near the simple contemporary vocabulary of Atomic Habits and Beach Read.
- Sentence structure: 27 out of 100
- A practical guide built around a 30-day challenge calls for short, direct, instructional sentences. The syntax is as accessible as contemporary popular nonfiction gets.
- Abstraction: 33 out of 100
- The book grounds its ideas in daily action items and Piper's own two years of buying nothing new. The history of marketing adds some conceptual material, but concrete steps dominate, much like Atomic Habits.
- Information density: 32 out of 100
- At roughly 80,000 words, it pairs a historical overview of marketing with a daily challenge structure. The pace is light and repeats its core idea, so it stays below Atomic Habits in density.
How No New Things is regarded
No New Things holds a literary regard score of 16 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.