The Undertaking by Audrey Magee
Published 2014 · 302 pages · 49,575 words · about 3 hours at an average pace · Historical Fiction
How hard is The Undertaking to read?
The Undertaking scores 56 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
- Contemporary prose.
- Sentence structure: 55 out of 100
- Essay style.
- Abstraction: 65 out of 100
- Death, ritual, life.
- Information density: 60 out of 100
- Funeral business.
- Narrative indirection: 55 out of 100
- First person essay.
- Symbolic density: 60 out of 100
- Death, bodies, ritual.
- Ironic distance: 55 out of 100
- Wry observation.
- Resolution withholding: 50 out of 100
- Essays conclude.
- Structural complexity: 52 out of 100
- Essay collection.
How The Undertaking is regarded
The Undertaking holds a literary regard score of 52 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.