Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg
Published 1993 · 124,300 words · about 8 hours at an average pace
How hard is Stone Butch Blues to read?
Stone Butch Blues scores 47 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: 42 out of 100
- Plain working-class vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 42 out of 100
- Short, direct sentences.
- Abstraction: 45 out of 100
- Concrete, with a political argument underneath.
- Information density: 52 out of 100
- Moderate; decades of labour and queer history.
- Narrative indirection: 48 out of 100
- A first-person account shaped by what Jess cannot yet name.
- Symbolic density: 52 out of 100
- The bar, the factory and the hands carry sustained weight.
- Ironic distance: 42 out of 100
- Little irony; the force is in directness.
- Resolution withholding: 58 out of 100
- The ending offers survival rather than resolution.
- Structural complexity: 42 out of 100
- Linear with letters framing it.
How Stone Butch Blues is regarded
Stone Butch Blues holds a literary regard score of 68 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.