Things in Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Li
Published 2025 · 192 pages · 84,597 words · about 6 hours at an average pace · Short Fiction
How hard is Things in Nature Merely Grow to read?
Things in Nature Merely Grow scores 53 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
- Li writes in precise, controlled English that captures the textures of memory and loss. The vocabulary is accessible but carefully chosen, with meaning emerging from exactness rather than elaboration.
- Sentence structure: 55 out of 100
- Sentences are often measured and quiet, building through accumulated observation of grief and survival. Li's prose has the rhythm of someone attending closely to what persists and what fades.
- Abstraction: 58 out of 100
- The stories explore memory, loss, and the presence of the dead through characters navigating grief in various forms. Nature provides the frame—growth, decay, seasons—for understanding how people continue after loss.
- Information density: 52 out of 100
- The natural world, the textures of grief, and the specific details that carry memory layer through the collection. Li builds her worlds through accumulated attention to gardens, bodies, and the small rituals that mark survival.
- Narrative indirection: 55 out of 100
- The stories approach their subjects with characteristic indirection, circling around loss rather than confronting it directly. The reader must interpret what the attention to nature reveals about what characters cannot say.
- Symbolic density: 55 out of 100
- Nature becomes symbolic of processes that continue regardless of human grief. Growth becomes symbolic of what persists beyond death. The seasons become symbolic of time that moves without us.
- Ironic distance: 50 out of 100
- Li maintains contemplative proximity to her characters, letting their experiences speak without ironic commentary. The stories are serious about grief while accepting its persistence.
- Resolution withholding: 52 out of 100
- Stories often end without resolution, characters continuing with their losses. Li offers the ongoing process without pretending understanding heals anything.
- Structural complexity: 52 out of 100
- The collection presents stories that can be read independently. Individual stories are accessible, with the emotional and thematic depth providing the challenge rather than formal complexity.
How Things in Nature Merely Grow is regarded
Things in Nature Merely Grow holds a literary regard score of 48 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.