Said the Shotgun to the Head by Saul Williams
Published 2003 · 52,800 words · about 5 hours at an average pace
How hard is Said the Shotgun to the Head to read?
Said the Shotgun to the Head scores 64 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 words used incantatorily.
- Sentence structure: 62 out of 100
- Broken lines and typographic play.
- Abstraction: 72 out of 100
- Faith and violence handled entirely in figure.
- Information density: 55 out of 100
- Compressed.
- Narrative indirection: 58 out of 100
- A speaker possessed by another voice.
- Symbolic density: 78 out of 100
- Almost nothing is literal.
- Ironic distance: 52 out of 100
- Some turns against its own prophecy.
- Resolution withholding: 72 out of 100
- Deliberately unresolved.
- Structural complexity: 68 out of 100
- A book-length poem with shifting form.
How Said the Shotgun to the Head is regarded
Said the Shotgun to the Head holds a literary regard score of 38 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.