The Wander Society by Keri Smith
Published 2016 · 176 pages · 48,400 words · about 2 hours at an average pace · Nonfiction, Essays & Criticism
How hard is The Wander Society to read?
The Wander Society scores 17 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: 22 out of 100
- Smith writes in plain, conversational English with short instructions and quoted lines from Whitman and Thoreau. Her words are as simple as Atomic Habits or Beach Read.
- Sentence structure: 22 out of 100
- Sentences are brief, list-like and imperative, with fragments in a notebook style. Only the quoted passages from older writers add any length.
- Abstraction: 30 out of 100
- Ideas about attention and drift stay tied to concrete actions: follow a stranger, walk a block, collect an object. It is concrete, like Atomic Habits, though somewhat more poetic.
- Information density: 25 out of 100
- The pages are sparse, with illustrations, whitespace and a few ideas per spread. Facts and references to earlier wanderers are light and easy to absorb.
How The Wander Society is regarded
The Wander Society holds a literary regard score of 22 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.