One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad
Published 2025 · 187 pages · 60,000 words · about 3 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism, Politics & Society, Memoir & Autobiography
How hard is One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This to read?
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This 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: 30 out of 100
- El Akkad writes in plain, direct journalistic English with little jargon. His prose is closer to Anne Frank's directness than to Fitzgerald's polish, though it is more adult in register.
- Sentence structure: 33 out of 100
- Sentences are short and declarative, built for force rather than ornament. Occasional longer rhetorical runs build anger, but nothing demands careful untangling.
- Abstraction: 42 out of 100
- The book moves between concrete scenes of watching and reporting and moral reflection on complicity and hindsight. Its argument is grounded in lived experience, in the manner of Atomic Habits' concrete examples but with heavier ethical weight.
- Information density: 38 out of 100
- It is a compact, essayistic book that relies on a few repeated ideas and recalled episodes instead of heavy data. Readers absorb it quickly, with fewer new facts per page than a history.
How One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is regarded
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This holds a literary regard score of 54 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.
Prizes
- National Book Award for Nonfiction 2025, winner