Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti
Published 2024 · 61,600 words · about 4 hours at an average pace
How hard is Alphabetical Diaries to read?
Alphabetical Diaries scores 63 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: 45 out of 100
- Plain diary vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 42 out of 100
- Short, simple sentences — the syntax is easy, the arrangement is not.
- Abstraction: 55 out of 100
- A life rendered as a data structure.
- Information density: 62 out of 100
- Ten years of diaries compressed.
- Narrative indirection: 68 out of 100
- A self assembled from sentences that no longer sit in time.
- Symbolic density: 40 out of 100
- Little conventional symbolism.
- Ironic distance: 58 out of 100
- The distance between the sentences and any narrative is the point.
- Resolution withholding: 82 out of 100
- There is no story to resolve.
- Structural complexity: 92 out of 100
- Every sentence sorted alphabetically, which destroys chronology entirely.
How Alphabetical Diaries is regarded
Alphabetical Diaries holds a literary regard score of 45 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.