The Fun Stuff: And Other Essays by James Wood
Published 2012 · 88,000 words · about 5 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism, Literary Criticism, Nonfiction, Memoir
How hard is The Fun Stuff: And Other Essays to read?
The Fun Stuff: And Other Essays scores 41 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. 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: 46 out of 100
- Wood writes in the register of serious literary journalism: precise, occasionally reaching for an unusual word, but never obscure for its own sake. A general reader with some exposure to literary fiction will rarely need a dictionary, unlike the specialized jargon of academic theory.
- Sentence structure: 54 out of 100
- His sentences are controlled and often periodic, building toward a judgment through several qualifying clauses before landing the verdict. It's demanding the way a well-argued magazine essay is demanding, not the way a legal brief or a Jamesian novel is.
- Abstraction: 56 out of 100
- The essays move between concrete close reading of a specific sentence or scene and more abstract claims about realism, belief, and the purpose of fiction, a pairing that recurs throughout Wood's criticism. The drumming essay grounds this abstraction in physical memory, but the critical essays stay mostly in the register of ideas.
- Information density: 58 out of 100
- Each essay compresses a writer's whole career, plus comparisons to several other writers, into a few thousand words of magazine argument. Readers unfamiliar with the authors under discussion will find each paragraph doing several kinds of work at once: summary, judgment, and theory.
How The Fun Stuff: And Other Essays is regarded
The Fun Stuff: And Other Essays holds a literary regard score of 54 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.