The Selected Works of Audre Lorde by Audre Lorde
Published 2020 · 101,200 words · about 7 hours at an average pace
How hard is The Selected Works of Audre Lorde to read?
The Selected Works of Audre Lorde scores 55 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: 58 out of 100
- Direct but charged vocabulary across poems and essays.
- Sentence structure: 58 out of 100
- Clear declarative sentences; the difficulty is not syntactic.
- Abstraction: 65 out of 100
- Personal experience raised consistently to theory.
- Information density: 60 out of 100
- Compressed, especially in the poetry.
- Narrative indirection: 45 out of 100
- A speaking voice close to the author, direct rather than concealed.
- Symbolic density: 68 out of 100
- The erotic, the mother and the sea recur as sustained figures.
- Ironic distance: 48 out of 100
- Little irony; the force is in directness.
- Resolution withholding: 55 out of 100
- The essays conclude; the poems characteristically do not.
- Structural complexity: 48 out of 100
- A mixed selection across forms and decades.
How The Selected Works of Audre Lorde is regarded
The Selected Works of Audre Lorde holds a literary regard score of 84 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.