The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald
Published 1978 · 180 pages · 38,901 words · about 3 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction
How hard is The Bookshop to read?
The Bookshop scores 52 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: 50 out of 100
- Fitzgerald's spare prose.
- Abstraction: 52 out of 100
- Community, books, defeat.
- Information density: 50 out of 100
- Suffolk town.
- Narrative indirection: 50 out of 100
- Third person.
- Symbolic density: 55 out of 100
- Bookshop, culture.
- Ironic distance: 58 out of 100
- Social observation.
- Resolution withholding: 52 out of 100
- Defeat clear.
- Structural complexity: 48 out of 100
- Short, linear.
How The Bookshop is regarded
The Bookshop holds a literary regard score of 50 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.