The Nine by Jeffrey Toobin
Published 2007 · 110,000 words · about 7 hours at an average pace · Journalism & Reportage, Law, Nonfiction, Politics & Society
How hard is The Nine to read?
The Nine scores 20 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it relatively accessible. 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: 30 out of 100
- Legal and political terminology. Accessible to general readers.
- Sentence structure: 28 out of 100
- Abstraction: 32 out of 100
- Constitutional principles grounded in personalities and cases.
- Information density: 45 out of 100
- Dense with legal history, personal detail, and political context.
- Narrative indirection: 100 out of 100
- Roughly chronological with justice-by-justice profiles.
- Symbolic density: 100 out of 100
- The Court as microcosm of American political conflict.
- Ironic distance: 15 out of 100
- Wry observations about judicial pretensions to neutrality.
- Resolution withholding: 100 out of 100
- The Court's rightward shift is the clear throughline.
- Structural complexity: 22 out of 100
- Thematic chapters organized around key cases and justices.
How The Nine is regarded
The Nine holds a literary regard score of 42 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.