The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell
Published 2014 · 656 pages · 164,000 words · about 18 hours at an average pace · Fantasy, Literary Fiction, Science Fiction
How hard is The Bone Clocks to read?
The Bone Clocks scores 59 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: 55 out of 100
- Mitchell's varied vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 55 out of 100
- Mitchell's varied styles.
- Abstraction: 60 out of 100
- Immortality, time, souls.
- Information density: 60 out of 100
- Multiple eras.
- Narrative indirection: 60 out of 100
- Multiple narrators, genres.
- Symbolic density: 62 out of 100
- Bones, clocks, souls.
- Ironic distance: 55 out of 100
- Genre awareness.
- Resolution withholding: 58 out of 100
- Apocalyptic ending.
- Structural complexity: 62 out of 100
- Six sections, many decades.
How The Bone Clocks is regarded
The Bone Clocks holds a literary regard score of 48 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.