A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler
Published 2015 · 384 pages · 96,000 words · about 6 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction
How hard is A Spool of Blue Thread to read?
A Spool of Blue Thread scores 42 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. 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: 30 out of 100
- Tyler's characteristically clear, accessible prose.
- Sentence structure: 32 out of 100
- Clean sentences serving family observation.
- Abstraction: 40 out of 100
- Questions of family and home through generations.
- Information density: 40 out of 100
- Four generations efficiently interwoven.
- Narrative indirection: 45 out of 100
- Multiple perspectives reveal family differently.
- Symbolic density: 50 out of 100
- The house and the thread carry family meaning.
- Ironic distance: 40 out of 100
- Tyler's warmth balanced with observation.
- Resolution withholding: 45 out of 100
- Family continues; house's fate resolved.
- Structural complexity: 45 out of 100
- Non-chronological family saga.
How A Spool of Blue Thread is regarded
A Spool of Blue Thread 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.