The Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood
Published 1945 · 550 pages · 135,128 words · about 9 hours at an average pace · Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction
How hard is The Berlin Stories to read?
The Berlin Stories scores 54 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
- Weimar vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 50 out of 100
- Isherwood's clear prose.
- Abstraction: 55 out of 100
- Decadence, politics.
- Information density: 55 out of 100
- 1930s Berlin.
- Narrative indirection: 55 out of 100
- First person, camera eye.
- Symbolic density: 55 out of 100
- Camera, cabaret.
- Ironic distance: 58 out of 100
- Detached observer.
- Resolution withholding: 55 out of 100
- Nazis rising.
- Structural complexity: 52 out of 100
- Linked stories.
How The Berlin Stories is regarded
The Berlin Stories holds a literary regard score of 79 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.