I Love Dick by Chris Kraus
Published 1997 · 77,000 words · about 5 hours at an average pace
How hard is I Love Dick to read?
I Love Dick scores 66 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
- Art-theory vocabulary inside personal letters.
- Sentence structure: 55 out of 100
- Clear sentences; the difficulty is elsewhere.
- Abstraction: 68 out of 100
- Obsession turned into criticism and back again.
- Information density: 62 out of 100
- Dense with theory, gossip and self-analysis.
- Narrative indirection: 72 out of 100
- A narrator who is also the author, editing herself in public.
- Symbolic density: 48 out of 100
- Little conventional symbolism.
- Ironic distance: 72 out of 100
- Sustained irony about her own abjection.
- Resolution withholding: 68 out of 100
- No resolution is possible or attempted.
- Structural complexity: 78 out of 100
- Letters, essays, faxes and third-person narration with no stable form.
How I Love Dick is regarded
I Love Dick holds a literary regard score of 68 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.