The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern
Published 2019 · 600 pages · 130,000 words · about 9 hours at an average pace · Fantasy, Literary Fiction
How hard is The Starless Sea to read?
The Starless Sea scores 33 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: 30 out of 100
- Ornate, literary vocabulary. Fairy-tale register.
- Sentence structure: 32 out of 100
- Abstraction: 35 out of 100
- Metafictional. The nature of stories is the subject.
- Information density: 38 out of 100
- Multiple nested narratives. Dense with imagery and allusion.
- Narrative indirection: 42 out of 100
- Nested stories within stories. Labyrinthine structure.
- Symbolic density: 40 out of 100
- Doors, keys, bees, books, the sea—everything is symbolic.
- Ironic distance: 80 out of 100
- Sincere, enchanted narration. No ironic detachment.
- Resolution withholding: 35 out of 100
- The connections between nested stories resolve slowly, if at all.
- Structural complexity: 40 out of 100
- Multiple nested narratives with metafictional layers.
How The Starless Sea is regarded
The Starless Sea holds a literary regard score of 28 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.