Salt by Mark Kurlansky
Published 2002 · 496 pages · 100,000 words · about 7 hours at an average pace · History, Nonfiction, Travel & Food
How hard is Salt to read?
Salt scores 19 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it relatively accessible. 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: 30 out of 100
- Accessible popular history. Some chemistry and trade terminology.
- Sentence structure: 28 out of 100
- Abstraction: 30 out of 100
- Concrete commodity history with sweeping connections.
- Information density: 50 out of 100
- Dense with historical detail, recipes, and trade routes.
- Narrative indirection: 15 out of 100
- Chronological with thematic connections. Direct storytelling.
- Symbolic density: 15 out of 100
- Salt functions as a lens for world history.
- Ironic distance: 100 out of 100
- Enthusiastic, engaged tone.
- Resolution withholding: 50 out of 100
- Each chapter completes its historical period.
- Structural complexity: 20 out of 100
- Chronological chapters with geographical organization.
How Salt is regarded
Salt 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.