Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris
Published 2007 · 444 pages · 110,000 words · about 7 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Satire & Humor
How hard is Then We Came to the End to read?
Then We Came to the End 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: 40 out of 100
- Corporate and advertising vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 50 out of 100
- Collective first-person; varied sentences.
- Abstraction: 50 out of 100
- Work, community, and fear.
- Information density: 50 out of 100
- Dense with office detail.
- Narrative indirection: 55 out of 100
- Collective "we" limits perspective.
- Symbolic density: 50 out of 100
- The office, layoffs carry weight.
- Ironic distance: 55 out of 100
- Ferris maintains comic distance.
- Resolution withholding: 50 out of 100
- Work ends; life continues.
- Structural complexity: 55 out of 100
- Collective first-person narrator.
How Then We Came to the End is regarded
Then We Came to the End holds a literary regard score of 60 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.