Trance by Christopher Sorrentino
Published 2005 · 643 pages · 167,000 words · about 11 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction
How hard is Trance to read?
Trance scores 44 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. 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
- Contemporary Bay Area vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 45 out of 100
- Clear, varied sentences.
- Abstraction: 45 out of 100
- Identity, belonging, and suburban life.
- Information density: 45 out of 100
- Dense with Bay Area detail.
- Narrative indirection: 45 out of 100
- Stories reveal through accumulation.
- Symbolic density: 45 out of 100
- Trance states, identity carry weight.
- Ironic distance: 45 out of 100
- Moody observes with thoughtful distance.
- Resolution withholding: 45 out of 100
- Stories end ambiguously.
- Structural complexity: 40 out of 100
- Story collection.
How Trance is regarded
Trance holds a literary regard score of 58 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.