I Wished by Dennis Cooper
Published 2021 · 136 pages · 37,400 words · about 2 hours at an average pace · Memoir & Autobiography, LGBTQ+ Fiction
How hard is I Wished to read?
I Wished scores 30 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: 32 out of 100
- Cooper is known for spare, plain prose, and a book about love and loss for a late partner likely keeps to direct contemporary language. It reads closer to Beach Read in register than to the ornate prose of Lolita.
- Sentence structure: 38 out of 100
- Cooper's style favors clean, controlled sentences. Reviewers' remarks about hidden formal complexity point to structure more than to sentence-level difficulty, so the syntax stays accessible.
- Abstraction: 45 out of 100
- The book grounds itself in one relationship between Dennis and George. It reaches for ideas by reading The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter alongside that relationship, which adds some abstraction beyond a plain memoir.
- Information density: 35 out of 100
- At about 37,000 words it is short, and it concentrates on one relationship and one guiding text. Its pace is light compared with the packed layering of Watchmen.
How I Wished is regarded
I Wished holds a literary regard score of 39 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.