On Being Blue by William H. Gass
Published 1975 · 25,025 words · about 2 hours at an average pace
How hard is On Being Blue to read?
On Being Blue scores 65 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: 72 out of 100
- An extravagant, deliberately showy vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 75 out of 100
- Long, ornate, self-delighting sentences.
- Abstraction: 82 out of 100
- A colour used to think about language itself.
- Information density: 70 out of 100
- Dense with quotation and allusion.
How On Being Blue is regarded
On Being Blue holds a literary regard score of 56 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.