Scotland's Books by Robert Crawford
Published 2007 · 831 pages · 200,000 words · about 17 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism
How hard is Scotland's Books to read?
Scotland's Books scores 50 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: 60 out of 100
- Accessible scholarly prose aimed at a general educated readership as well as specialists.
- Sentence structure: 52 out of 100
- Abstraction: 62 out of 100
- Primarily a narrative and descriptive history with interpretive claims woven in.
- Information density: 78 out of 100
- Covers fifteen centuries of literature with biographical, historical, and critical information on every page.
- Narrative indirection: 100 out of 100
- Straightforwardly chronological; each author and period treated in sequence.
- Symbolic density: 12 out of 100
- Analytical exposition of literary texts rather than figurative critical writing.
- Ironic distance: 12 out of 100
- Affectionate and earnest tone toward its subject throughout.
- Resolution withholding: 100 out of 100
- Clear organization and chapter conclusions throughout.
- Structural complexity: 38 out of 100
- Long chronological structure with thematic sub-sections; complexity is encyclopedic rather than formal.
How Scotland's Books is regarded
Scotland's Books holds a literary regard score of 85 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.