ReadingRate · What's new · 2026-10-30
See the order of complexity a book sustains
A book's page can now show its order of complexity: what the book asks you to hold together. It names the stage the book sustains and the stage its hardest passage peaks at, on a scale that runs from single events, through a line between variables, to whole constellations of ideas compared with one another. Under it the book is drawn passage by passage, with the peak passage quoted whole. It appears for books ReadingRate has read in full, and it is free.
Available on web and iOS.
Difficulty scores say how hard the words and sentences are. This is a different measure: the stage is what a passage asks its reader to hold together, not what its characters think or how hard its words are. A book sustains the highest stage that at least a tenth of its passages reach.
The same full-text read gives a book's page a dossier: the four verdicts that place it among Northrop Frye's kinds of story, each with the passage that earned it, and where and when the story takes place.
A guide page explains the stages with one claim argued at each.
What it can't do
- Only books that have had a full-text read show it, and most of the catalogue has not.
- It describes the book. It says nothing about what stage a reader is at.
- A card that would show the stages across your own shelf is built but is not switched on for readers.
- On the iPhone it is the Complexity tab of a book's page; on the website it is a section of the page.
Questions people ask
- What is a book's order of complexity?
- The stage of thinking a book asks of its reader, read from the full text passage by passage. ReadingRate shows the stage a book sustains and the stage its hardest passage reaches. It is a fact about the book, not about the reader.