Persian Literature: A Bio-Bibliographical Survey by Charles Ambrose Storey
Published 1927 · 200,000 words · about 17 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism
How hard is Persian Literature: A Bio-Bibliographical Survey to read?
Persian Literature: A Bio-Bibliographical Survey scores 42 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. 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: 70 out of 100
- Extensive Persian and Arabic terminology; specialized bibliographical vocabulary requires familiarity with the field.
- Sentence structure: 52 out of 100
- Abstraction: 62 out of 100
- The organizational categories reflect significant intellectual decisions about genre and tradition, but prose is largely descriptive.
- Information density: 85 out of 100
- Among the densest reference works in the field: each entry compresses authorship, dating, manuscripts, and editions into compressed scholarly notation.
- Narrative indirection: 100 out of 100
- Reference format; directness is the governing principle.
- Symbolic density: 100 out of 100
- A bibliographical survey; symbolism is not a feature of its prose.
- Ironic distance: 100 out of 100
- Encyclopedic neutrality throughout.
- Resolution withholding: 100 out of 100
- Each entry is a self-contained description; no narrative withholding.
- Structural complexity: 50 out of 100
- Organized by a complex multi-level classification system spanning multiple volumes over decades of accumulation.
How Persian Literature: A Bio-Bibliographical Survey is regarded
Persian Literature: A Bio-Bibliographical Survey holds a literary regard score of 87 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.