ReadingRate · What's new · 2026-01-05

Every book scored on nine dimensions of difficulty

Every book in the ReadingRate catalogue carries nine difficulty scores rather than a single reading level, split into technical difficulty — vocabulary, sentence structure, abstraction, information density — and interpretive difficulty — narrative indirection, symbolic density, ironic distance, withheld resolution, structural complexity. Each score comes with a short written explanation of why the book scored that way.

Available on web and iOS.

Grade-level formulas count syllables per word and words per sentence, so they rate plain-spoken but deeply ironic prose as easy and verbose but perfectly clear prose as hard. For literature that is close to backwards.

Separating the two kinds of difficulty is what makes the number usable. A book can be easy to read and hard to understand, which describes a lot of the best short fiction; or hard to read and perfectly clear once decoded, which describes plenty of dense nonfiction. Those are different evenings.

Difficulty is deliberately kept separate from literary regard, which is scored on its own dimensions. Treating them as one number would flatter difficult books.

What it can't do

  • A difficulty score says nothing about whether you'll enjoy a book.
  • It cannot account for what you already know — a dense book in a familiar field reads easier for you than the score suggests.
  • It cannot measure translation quality, which can change a work's difficulty substantially.
  • Nonfiction is scored on its own set of dimensions rather than the fiction ones, so the two are not directly comparable.

Questions people ask

How does ReadingRate measure book difficulty?
On nine dimensions, splitting technical difficulty (vocabulary, sentence structure, abstraction, information density) from interpretive difficulty (narrative indirection, symbolism, irony, withheld resolution, structure). Each carries a written reason.
Is this a reading level like Flesch-Kincaid?
No. Readability formulas measure word and sentence length and say nothing about meaning, which is why they call ironic, plain-spoken prose easy.

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