The End of the Story by Lydia Davis
Published 1994 · 63,525 words · about 6 hours at an average pace
How hard is The End of the Story to read?
The End of the Story scores 64 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
- Plain words used with great precision.
- Sentence structure: 55 out of 100
- Exact, analytic sentences.
- Abstraction: 65 out of 100
- A love affair examined as a problem of composition.
- Information density: 58 out of 100
- Light on event, heavy on second-guessing.
- Narrative indirection: 72 out of 100
- A narrator writing the novel you are reading, revising as she goes.
- Symbolic density: 45 out of 100
- Little conventional symbolism.
- Ironic distance: 62 out of 100
- Constant distance between feeling and the analysis of feeling.
- Resolution withholding: 78 out of 100
- The affair and the novel are both left unfinished, deliberately.
- Structural complexity: 78 out of 100
- The book keeps doubling back on its own construction.
How The End of the Story is regarded
The End of the Story holds a literary regard score of 59 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.