Witness by Jamel Brinkley
Published 2023 · 66,000 words · about 5 hours at an average pace
How hard is Witness to read?
Witness 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: 52 out of 100
- Precise contemporary vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 55 out of 100
- Well-made sentences.
- Abstraction: 55 out of 100
- Concrete New York lives with a running argument about seeing.
- Information density: 55 out of 100
- Moderate per story.
- Narrative indirection: 58 out of 100
- Varied; several narrators fail to act on what they witness.
- Symbolic density: 55 out of 100
- Witnessing itself is the governing figure.
- Ironic distance: 52 out of 100
- Steady distance between what characters see and do.
- Resolution withholding: 68 out of 100
- Stories characteristically end unresolved.
- Structural complexity: 48 out of 100
- A collection with a shared preoccupation.
How Witness is regarded
Witness holds a literary regard score of 42 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.