Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature by Margaret Atwood
Published 1995 · 160 pages · 60,000 words · about 5 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism
How hard is Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature to read?
Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature scores 26 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: 60 out of 100
- Accessible lecture prose; written for Oxford audiences rather than literary specialists.
- Sentence structure: 50 out of 100
- Abstraction: 60 out of 100
- Cultural analysis grounded in specific myths and texts; abstraction is moderate and well anchored.
- Information density: 70 out of 100
- Covers a substantial body of primary material within a concise framework.
- Narrative indirection: 30 out of 100
- Atwood moves through argument with clarity; narrative examples illuminate rather than substitute for argument.
- Symbolic density: 70 out of 100
- The Wendigo, the Franklin expedition, and Grey Owl are analyzed as mythic-symbolic constructs.
- Ironic distance: 50 out of 100
- Atwood's characteristic dry wit inflects the analysis; irony is present but not dominant.
- Resolution withholding: 20 out of 100
- Each lecture ends with clear conclusions; the book does not cultivate mystery.
- Structural complexity: 40 out of 100
- Four lectures, four myths; the structure is transparent and self-contained.
How Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature is regarded
Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature holds a literary regard score of 42 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.