ReadingRate · What's new · 2026-10-16
Read essays that show the data behind the book
ReadingRate now publishes Marginalia, essays by its founder on books he has finished, at /essays. Each essay sits beside what ReadingRate measures about the book: its nine difficulty measures drawn against the writer's own comfort zone, its literary regard with the reasons for each part, its place on Northrop Frye's wheel of stories, and the reading domains it counts toward. Eleven essays are live. They are free and need no account.
Available on web.
An essay page opens on a title card with the book in numbers: its words, its difficulty, its regard, the days it took to read and the pace. A sky above the text shows the books finished since the previous essay, lit in the order they were read.
Where an essay has a video episode, the page carries it and the chapter headings start the video at their time. A Read with button opens the essay in Claude or ChatGPT, or copies the whole essay as text.
The same essays go out as a newsletter, and each page links to that version where there is one.
What it can't do
- These are one reader's essays. There is no way to publish your own.
- The figures are frozen on the day the essay was saved and do not update with the catalogue.
- Not every essay has every figure; a figure appears only where the book had that data when the essay was saved.
- The essays are in English, on the website only. There are no comments.
Questions people ask
- What is Marginalia?
- A series of essays by ReadingRate's founder on books he has finished, published at readingrate.com/essays. Each one is set beside ReadingRate's own measurements of the book.