With Fire and Sword by Henryk Sienkiewicz

Published 1884 · 1,135 pages · 290,947 words · about 20 hours at an average pace · Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction

How hard is With Fire and Sword to read?

With Fire and Sword scores 56 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: 65 out of 100
Polish historical vocabulary.
Sentence structure: 62 out of 100
Epic prose.
Abstraction: 60 out of 100
War, nation, heroism.
Information density: 70 out of 100
17th century Poland.
Narrative indirection: 52 out of 100
Third person epic.
Symbolic density: 55 out of 100
Fire, sword, nation.
Ironic distance: 48 out of 100
Romantic nationalism.
Resolution withholding: 50 out of 100
Epic resolution.
Structural complexity: 58 out of 100
Epic structure.

How With Fire and Sword is regarded

With Fire and Sword holds a literary regard score of 69 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.

About the author

Henryk Sienkiewicz