The Wild Places by Robert Macfarlane
Published 2007 · 89,402 words · about 6 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism
How hard is The Wild Places to read?
The Wild Places scores 51 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: 72 out of 100
- Rich literary and natural history vocabulary; the writing rewards readers with wide reading.
- Sentence structure: 68 out of 100
- Abstraction: 75 out of 100
- Moves between landscape description and cultural-historical reflection; concrete observation underpins every abstraction.
- Information density: 78 out of 100
- Each chapter carries literary history, natural history, and autobiographical narrative simultaneously.
- Narrative indirection: 45 out of 100
- The argument about wildness as attention rather than location emerges gradually through accumulated journeys.
- Symbolic density: 70 out of 100
- Wild places accumulate symbolic weight as figures for freedom, death, and time.
- Ironic distance: 30 out of 100
- Occasional wry irony when Macfarlane confronts the gap between literary ideas of wildness and the thing itself.
- Resolution withholding: 70 out of 100
- The book ends with a definition of wildness that is explicit but deliberately incomplete.
- Structural complexity: 65 out of 100
- Journey-by-journey structure is clear; the argument requires tracking across chapters.
How The Wild Places is regarded
The Wild Places holds a literary regard score of 65 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.