The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells
Published 2019 · 80,000 words · about 5 hours at an average pace · Journalism & Reportage, Nature & Environment, Nonfiction, Science & Nature
How hard is The Uninhabitable Earth to read?
The Uninhabitable Earth scores 26 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: 30 out of 100
- Climate science terms made accessible.
- Sentence structure: 30 out of 100
- Abstraction: 32 out of 100
- Climate projections made concrete and immediate.
- Information density: 52 out of 100
- Dense with data, projections, and consequences.
- Narrative indirection: 80 out of 100
- Direct, thesis-driven catalogue of effects.
- Symbolic density: 15 out of 100
- Climate change as existential threat.
- Ironic distance: 12 out of 100
- Alarm tempered by analytical clarity.
- Resolution withholding: 22 out of 100
- The catastrophe is ongoing and accelerating.
- Structural complexity: 22 out of 100
- Thematic chapters on different effects of warming.
How The Uninhabitable Earth is regarded
The Uninhabitable Earth holds a literary regard score of 40 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.