Pity by Andrew McMillan
Published 1990 · 193,325 words · about 15 hours at an average pace
How hard is Pity to read?
Pity scores 59 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: 52 out of 100
- Plain Northern vocabulary with lyric heights.
- Sentence structure: 55 out of 100
- Short sections, some in verse.
- Abstraction: 58 out of 100
- Concrete post-industrial town carrying a study of inheritance.
- Information density: 52 out of 100
- Light on event.
- Narrative indirection: 62 out of 100
- Several generations narrated in fragments.
- Symbolic density: 58 out of 100
- The pit and the drag act do sustained work.
- Ironic distance: 52 out of 100
- Some distance between the men's silences and the reader's view.
- Resolution withholding: 65 out of 100
- Little is resolved.
- Structural complexity: 65 out of 100
- Fragments across three generations, mixing prose and verse.
How Pity is regarded
Pity 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.