Sula by Toni Morrison
Published 1973 · 248 pages · 48,162 words · about 3 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction
How hard is Sula to read?
Sula scores 58 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
- Morrison writes in lyrical prose that draws on African American vernacular and biblical cadence. The vocabulary is accessible but charged with symbolic weight, each word carefully chosen.
- Sentence structure: 55 out of 100
- Sentences are rhythmic and often elliptical, building through suggestion rather than statement. Morrison's syntax has the quality of incantation, requiring readers to surrender to its music.
- Abstraction: 62 out of 100
- The novel explores friendship, identity, and the constraints placed on Black women's lives. Nel and Sula embody different responses to these constraints—conformity and rebellion.
- Information density: 55 out of 100
- The Bottom's history, the women's intertwined lives, and the community's mythology layer densely through the short novel. Morrison creates density through compression and symbolic weight.
- Narrative indirection: 58 out of 100
- The novel moves through Nel and Sula's lives with gaps and ellipses, leaving readers to infer what happens between scenes. Morrison trusts readers to fill the spaces she leaves.
- Symbolic density: 65 out of 100
- Sula's birthmark, the plague of robins, and the tunnel disaster all carry symbolic weight. The Bottom—the Black neighborhood promised 'the bottom of heaven'—becomes symbolic of promises broken.
- Ironic distance: 55 out of 100
- Morrison sees both Nel's conformity and Sula's rebellion as responses to impossible constraints. The irony is in how the community judges Sula while benefiting from her presence.
- Resolution withholding: 58 out of 100
- Nel's final recognition of her love for Sula comes too late. Morrison provides emotional resolution while refusing to pretend the losses can be recovered.
- Structural complexity: 55 out of 100
- The novel moves through decades with chapter headings marking years, but the chronology is not strictly linear. The structure demands readers track the women's lives across time.
How Sula is regarded
Sula holds a literary regard score of 72 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.