Scaffolding by Lauren Elkin
Published 2002 · 45,375 words · about 4 hours at an average pace
How hard is Scaffolding to read?
Scaffolding scores 58 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: 55 out of 100
- Architectural and psychoanalytic vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 55 out of 100
- Long, considered sentences.
- Abstraction: 62 out of 100
- An apartment used to think about repetition and desire.
- Information density: 55 out of 100
- Moderate, with theory threaded through.
- Narrative indirection: 58 out of 100
- Two couples fifty years apart, echoing each other.
- Symbolic density: 58 out of 100
- The renovation is the governing figure.
- Ironic distance: 52 out of 100
- Distance between the analyst's insight and her conduct.
- Resolution withholding: 65 out of 100
- The parallels are left unexplained.
- Structural complexity: 62 out of 100
- Two timelines that never meet.
How Scaffolding is regarded
Scaffolding holds a literary regard score of 37 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.