House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday
Published 1969 · 198 pages · 67,808 words · about 5 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction
How hard is House Made of Dawn to read?
House Made of Dawn scores 61 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
- Native American and ceremonial vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 58 out of 100
- Momaday's lyrical, complex sentences.
- Abstraction: 65 out of 100
- Identity, land, and ceremony.
- Information density: 60 out of 100
- Dense with Pueblo and ceremonial detail.
- Narrative indirection: 65 out of 100
- Fragmented, ceremonial structure.
- Symbolic density: 70 out of 100
- Dawn, landscape carry enormous weight.
- Ironic distance: 50 out of 100
- Momaday writes with engaged intensity.
- Resolution withholding: 55 out of 100
- Running at dawn; healing suggested.
- Structural complexity: 65 out of 100
- Four-part ceremonial structure.
How House Made of Dawn is regarded
House Made of Dawn holds a literary regard score of 88 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.