Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart
Published 2001 · 91,850 words · about 7 hours at an average pace
How hard is Super Sad True Love Story to read?
Super Sad True Love Story scores 58 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: 52 out of 100
- Contemporary register plus a lot of invented corporate and network jargon.
- Sentence structure: 48 out of 100
- Fluent, comic, quick.
- Abstraction: 50 out of 100
- Concrete relationship set inside an abstract argument about media and value.
- Information density: 58 out of 100
- Heavy with invented brands, ratings and apparatus.
- Narrative indirection: 58 out of 100
- Two diaries with two very different degrees of self-knowledge.
- Symbolic density: 55 out of 100
- The äppärät and the credit rankings work as sustained emblems.
- Ironic distance: 78 out of 100
- The whole novel is satirical; almost nothing is meant flatly.
- Resolution withholding: 55 out of 100
- The love story ends, but the political situation is left mid-collapse.
- Structural complexity: 58 out of 100
- Alternating diary and message streams, with an afterword frame.
How Super Sad True Love Story is regarded
Super Sad True Love Story holds a literary regard score of 60 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.