The Bird of Night by Susan Hill
Published 1972 · 185 pages · 46,250 words · about 5 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction
How hard is The Bird of Night to read?
The Bird of Night 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
- British vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 52 out of 100
- Hill's clear prose.
- Abstraction: 58 out of 100
- Genius, madness, devotion.
- Information density: 52 out of 100
- Poet's life.
- Narrative indirection: 55 out of 100
- First person retrospective.
- Symbolic density: 58 out of 100
- Night, bird, poetry.
- Ironic distance: 52 out of 100
- Devoted narrator.
- Resolution withholding: 55 out of 100
- Memory of genius.
- Structural complexity: 50 out of 100
- Memoir structure.
How The Bird of Night is regarded
The Bird of Night holds a literary regard score of 58 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.