The Black Book by Orhan Pamuk
Published 1990 · 725 pages · 158,000 words · about 11 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Mystery & Crime
How hard is The Black Book to read?
The Black Book scores 64 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: 58 out of 100
- Turkish, philosophical.
- Sentence structure: 62 out of 100
- Pamuk's layered prose.
- Abstraction: 68 out of 100
- Identity, Istanbul, self.
- Information density: 60 out of 100
- Istanbul history.
- Narrative indirection: 65 out of 100
- Detective and columnist.
- Symbolic density: 68 out of 100
- Black book, identity.
- Ironic distance: 58 out of 100
- Self-conscious narration.
- Resolution withholding: 65 out of 100
- Identity unclear.
- Structural complexity: 65 out of 100
- Alternating narratives.
How The Black Book is regarded
The Black Book holds a literary regard score of 61 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.