Self-Reliance and Other Essays (Dover Thrift Editions: Philosophy) by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Published 1993 · 117 pages · 132,607 words · about 11 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism, Nonfiction
How hard is Self-Reliance and Other Essays (Dover Thrift Editions: Philosophy) to read?
Self-Reliance and Other Essays (Dover Thrift Editions: Philosophy) scores 61 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: 66 out of 100
- Emerson draws on classical names, Greek and Latin tags, and 19th-century philosophical terms such as 'metempsychosis' and 'Pyrrhonism', but most of his words are plain. He sits between The Great Gatsby's accessible elegance and To the Lighthouse's elevated prose.
- Sentence structure: 62 out of 100
- He alternates long periodic sentences and chains of clauses with blunt one-line aphorisms like 'Trust thyself.' The syntax is demanding but rarely tangled, closer to Anna Karenina's embedded sentences than to Henry James.
- Abstraction: 82 out of 100
- The essays argue about the Over-Soul, identity of mind and nature, and the law of Compensation, with only brief concrete illustrations such as the rose or the boys in the street. That puts the book near The Master and Margarita's philosophical register, below the pure abstraction of Notes from Underground.
- Information density: 74 out of 100
- Nearly every paragraph packs in allusions to Plutarch, Greek myth, Napoleon, science and scripture, and Emerson moves on before the reader can settle. The density resembles Moby-Dick's digressions but runs shorter.
How Self-Reliance and Other Essays (Dover Thrift Editions: Philosophy) is regarded
Self-Reliance and Other Essays (Dover Thrift Editions: Philosophy) holds a literary regard score of 90 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.