Open Throat by Henry Hoke
Published 2023
How hard is Open Throat to read?
Open Throat scores 57 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: 35 out of 100
- Deliberately restricted — the narrator has only the words it has overheard.
- Sentence structure: 45 out of 100
- Lowercase, unpunctuated, broken lines closer to verse than prose.
- Abstraction: 55 out of 100
- A concrete city seen through a mind that cannot categorise it.
- Information density: 35 out of 100
- Very light per page.
- Narrative indirection: 78 out of 100
- A mountain lion narrates, misunderstanding almost everything it reports.
- Symbolic density: 62 out of 100
- Fire, hunger and the hillside carry the meaning.
- Ironic distance: 55 out of 100
- The gap between what the lion sees and what the reader understands is constant.
- Resolution withholding: 62 out of 100
- The ending is deliberately unfixed.
- Structural complexity: 58 out of 100
- Fragmentary sections with no conventional chapters.
How Open Throat is regarded
Open Throat holds a literary regard score of 40 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.