The Book and the Brotherhood by Iris Murdoch
Published 1987 · 607 pages · 217,322 words · about 16 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction
How hard is The Book and the Brotherhood to read?
The Book and the Brotherhood 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: 60 out of 100
- Murdoch's philosophical vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 58 out of 100
- Murdoch's elaborate prose.
- Abstraction: 68 out of 100
- Politics, friendship, ideas.
- Information density: 58 out of 100
- Oxford, Marxism.
- Narrative indirection: 58 out of 100
- Multiple perspectives.
- Symbolic density: 60 out of 100
- Book, brotherhood.
- Ironic distance: 58 out of 100
- Intellectual irony.
- Resolution withholding: 55 out of 100
- Relationships evolve.
- Structural complexity: 58 out of 100
- Ensemble cast.
How The Book and the Brotherhood is regarded
The Book and the Brotherhood 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.