The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins
Published 2015 · 107,250 words · about 8 hours at an average pace
How hard is The Library at Mount Char to read?
The Library at Mount Char scores 58 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 vocabulary with invented cosmology.
- Sentence structure: 50 out of 100
- Clear, fast sentences.
- Abstraction: 58 out of 100
- Concrete violence inside an abstract system.
- Information density: 58 out of 100
- Considerable world-building withheld deliberately.
- Narrative indirection: 62 out of 100
- A narrator who does not understand the world she describes.
- Symbolic density: 58 out of 100
- The Library and the catalogues carry the theme.
- Ironic distance: 55 out of 100
- Comic distance from extreme violence.
- Resolution withholding: 62 out of 100
- The rules are explained very late.
- Structural complexity: 62 out of 100
- Non-linear with withheld backstory.
How The Library at Mount Char is regarded
The Library at Mount Char holds a literary regard score of 31 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.