The Lottery by Shirley Jackson
Published 1983 · 81,945 words · about 6 hours at an average pace
How hard is The Lottery to read?
The Lottery scores 52 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: 32 out of 100
- Deliberately flat, ordinary village vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 32 out of 100
- Short declarative sentences with no ornament at all.
- Abstraction: 35 out of 100
- Concrete and domestic until the last page.
- Information density: 35 out of 100
- Very light; almost nothing happens for most of the story.
- Narrative indirection: 65 out of 100
- The narrator withholds the one fact that matters, reporting the morning as though it were unremarkable.
- Symbolic density: 78 out of 100
- The black box, the stones and the slips of paper carry meanings never stated.
- Ironic distance: 88 out of 100
- The cheerful reportorial tone against the event it describes is the whole method.
- Resolution withholding: 45 out of 100
- The ritual completes, but its origin and purpose are never explained.
- Structural complexity: 25 out of 100
- A single morning told straight through.
How The Lottery is regarded
The Lottery holds a literary regard score of 89 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.