Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin
Published 1978 · 102,850 words · about 6 hours at an average pace
How hard is Tales of the City to read?
Tales of the City scores 40 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: 38 out of 100
- Plain, warm, colloquial.
- Sentence structure: 38 out of 100
- Very short sentences; it was written as a newspaper serial.
- Abstraction: 35 out of 100
- Concrete throughout.
- Information density: 45 out of 100
- A large cast to track.
- Narrative indirection: 30 out of 100
- Reliable third person across many viewpoints.
- Symbolic density: 32 out of 100
- Barbary Lane carries modest weight.
- Ironic distance: 55 out of 100
- Steady comic irony about San Francisco.
- Resolution withholding: 40 out of 100
- A serial, so threads carry over.
- Structural complexity: 45 out of 100
- Very short chapters cycling through a large cast.
How Tales of the City is regarded
Tales of the City holds a literary regard score of 65 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.