The Book of X by Sarah Rose Etter
Published 2019 · 284 pages · 78,100 words · about 7 hours at an average pace
How hard is The Book of X to read?
The Book of X scores 62 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: 48 out of 100
- Plain words in a surreal register.
- Sentence structure: 50 out of 100
- Short fragments with white space.
- Abstraction: 65 out of 100
- The body treated almost entirely as figure.
- Information density: 48 out of 100
- Light per page.
- Narrative indirection: 65 out of 100
- A narrator whose body and reality are both unstable.
- Symbolic density: 78 out of 100
- The knot and the meat quarry are pure allegory.
- Ironic distance: 52 out of 100
- Distance between the surreal surface and the ordinary pain.
- Resolution withholding: 68 out of 100
- Nothing is explained.
- Structural complexity: 68 out of 100
- Fragments with interleaved lists and visions.
How The Book of X is regarded
The Book of X holds a literary regard score of 34 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.