The World as I Found It by Bruce Duffy
Published 1987 · 150,150 words · about 12 hours at an average pace
How hard is The World as I Found It to read?
The World as I Found It scores 60 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: 62 out of 100
- Philosophical vocabulary inside the novel.
- Sentence structure: 65 out of 100
- Long, formal sentences.
- Abstraction: 72 out of 100
- Wittgenstein's thought dramatised, so highly abstract.
- Information density: 62 out of 100
- Dense with philosophy and period detail.
- Narrative indirection: 58 out of 100
- Three shifting viewpoints on one impenetrable man.
- Symbolic density: 55 out of 100
- The tower and the war carry weight.
- Ironic distance: 58 out of 100
- Distance between the philosophers' theories and their lives.
- Resolution withholding: 58 out of 100
- Wittgenstein is never explained.
- Structural complexity: 58 out of 100
- Three lives braided across decades.
How The World as I Found It is regarded
The World as I Found It holds a literary regard score of 37 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.