The Centaur by John Updike
Published 1964 · 302 pages · 96,000 words · about 7 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction
How hard is The Centaur to read?
The Centaur scores 61 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
- Mythological vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 58 out of 100
- Updike's layered prose.
- Abstraction: 65 out of 100
- Myth, mortality, father.
- Information density: 55 out of 100
- Pennsylvania, mythology.
- Narrative indirection: 65 out of 100
- Mythic overlay.
- Symbolic density: 70 out of 100
- Chiron, centaur.
- Ironic distance: 55 out of 100
- Mythic distance.
- Resolution withholding: 58 out of 100
- Father's sacrifice.
- Structural complexity: 62 out of 100
- Dual narrative.
How The Centaur is regarded
The Centaur holds a literary regard score of 67 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.