Notes of a Crocodile by Qiu Miaojin
Published 1994 · 66,550 words · about 6 hours at an average pace · LGBTQ+ Fiction, Literary Fiction
How hard is Notes of a Crocodile to read?
Notes of a Crocodile scores 62 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: 55 out of 100
- Allusive, with Western literary reference throughout.
- Sentence structure: 58 out of 100
- Fragmentary notebook entries.
- Abstraction: 62 out of 100
- Desire examined at a high level of self-analysis.
- Information density: 55 out of 100
- Compressed and allusive.
- Narrative indirection: 68 out of 100
- Eight notebooks by a narrator constructing herself as she writes.
- Symbolic density: 62 out of 100
- The crocodile sections work as sustained allegory.
- Ironic distance: 55 out of 100
- Constant distance between confession and performance.
- Resolution withholding: 68 out of 100
- Nothing resolves; the form refuses it.
- Structural complexity: 68 out of 100
- Notebooks interleaved with an unrelated allegory.
How Notes of a Crocodile is regarded
Notes of a Crocodile holds a literary regard score of 54 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.