The Book of Goose by Yiyun Li
Published 2022 · 101,200 words · about 7 hours at an average pace
How hard is The Book of Goose to read?
The Book of Goose scores 60 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: 55 out of 100
- Plain but exact vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 58 out of 100
- Controlled sentences of moderate length.
- Abstraction: 58 out of 100
- Concrete rural childhood carrying a question about authorship.
- Information density: 55 out of 100
- Moderate.
- Narrative indirection: 68 out of 100
- A narrator remembering a friendship she may have entirely misread.
- Symbolic density: 58 out of 100
- The geese and the writing carry sustained weight.
- Ironic distance: 68 out of 100
- Steady distance between Agnès's account and what the reader infers.
- Resolution withholding: 65 out of 100
- Who wrote what is never settled.
- Structural complexity: 52 out of 100
- A retrospective with an unstable centre.
How The Book of Goose is regarded
The Book of Goose holds a literary regard score of 51 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.