Parade by Rachel Cusk
Published 2024 · 48,000 words · about 3 hours at an average pace
How hard is Parade to read?
Parade scores 70 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
- Precise, cool vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 62 out of 100
- Long, controlled sentences.
- Abstraction: 72 out of 100
- Art, gender and selfhood handled almost entirely abstractly.
- Information density: 58 out of 100
- Light on event, dense in thought.
- Narrative indirection: 78 out of 100
- Several unnamed artists all called G, with no stable narrator at all.
- Symbolic density: 62 out of 100
- The inverted paintings carry the argument.
- Ironic distance: 62 out of 100
- Constant distance between narration and feeling.
- Resolution withholding: 82 out of 100
- Nothing resolves; the book refuses narrative.
- Structural complexity: 82 out of 100
- Four unmarked sections that do not obviously connect.
How Parade is regarded
Parade holds a literary regard score of 51 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.