The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen
Published 1978 · 336 pages · 70,000 words · about 5 hours at an average pace · Nonfiction, Religion & Spirituality, Science & Nature, Travel & Food
How hard is The Snow Leopard to read?
The Snow Leopard scores 24 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: 35 out of 100
- Buddhist terminology, Himalayan geography, natural history.
- Sentence structure: 35 out of 100
- Abstraction: 35 out of 100
- Concrete landscape interwoven with Zen philosophy.
- Information density: 48 out of 100
- Dense with natural observation and spiritual reflection.
- Narrative indirection: 22 out of 100
- Outer journey and inner journey interleave.
- Symbolic density: 30 out of 100
- The snow leopard as absence, enlightenment, acceptance.
- Ironic distance: 12 out of 100
- Sincere spiritual seeking. No detachment.
- Resolution withholding: 28 out of 100
- The leopard may or may not appear. The search is the point.
- Structural complexity: 25 out of 100
- Journal structure with philosophical and spiritual layers.
How The Snow Leopard is regarded
The Snow Leopard holds a literary regard score of 61 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.