Wild at Heart by John Eldredge
Published 2001 · 224 pages · 67,000 words · about 4 hours at an average pace · Nonfiction, Religion & Spirituality, Self-Help
How hard is Wild at Heart to read?
Wild at Heart scores 24 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: 28 out of 100
- Eldredge writes in everyday, spoken American English: 'what the heck', 'Amen to that', 'Good Lord'. Scripture quotations and the occasional outdoorsman's word (wapiti, timberline, the Continental Divide) are the only departures from plain vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 28 out of 100
- Short declarative sentences, fragments and one-line paragraphs ('And that is why I come.' 'I am looking for my heart.') set a sermon-like rhythm. Rhetorical questions and direct address to the reader replace subordinate clauses.
- Abstraction: 42 out of 100
- The book's key terms, the heart, the wound and the Question, are spiritual abstractions. Eldredge grounds each one in hunting trips, canoe runs, his sons' schoolyard fights and scenes from Braveheart and Gladiator, so the abstraction rarely floats free of a story.
- Information density: 32 out of 100
- Each chapter circles a single idea and restates it through anecdote, film and Scripture. Readers can skim a page without losing the thread; little new information arrives per paragraph.
How Wild at Heart is regarded
Wild at Heart holds a literary regard score of 31 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.