Rice by Su Tong
Published 1991 · 270 pages · 65,000 words · about 4 hours at an average pace · Fiction, Literary Fiction, Historical Fiction
How hard is Rice to read?
Rice scores 33 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: 35 out of 100
- Visceral, body-centered language. Vocabulary of hunger, commerce, and violence. Some period-specific and trade-specific terms.
- Sentence structure: 35 out of 100
- Driving, propulsive prose that mirrors Five Dragons' relentless ambition. Longer descriptive passages alternate with clipped action sequences.
- Abstraction: 30 out of 100
- Overwhelmingly physical and concrete. The allegorical dimension emerges from the accumulation of bodily detail, not from abstract reflection.
- Information density: 40 out of 100
- Decades of plot compressed into a tightly paced narrative. Each chapter covers significant ground in Five Dragons' rise.
- Narrative indirection: 25 out of 100
- Direct third-person narrative following Five Dragons chronologically. The story is told with visceral directness.
- Symbolic density: 50 out of 100
- Rice is the novel's controlling symbol — sustenance, commerce, power, obsession. Five Dragons' body itself becomes a symbol of insatiable appetite.
- Ironic distance: 35 out of 100
- The narrator observes Five Dragons without moral commentary, allowing the reader to judge. The gap between Five Dragons' self-image and reality creates quiet irony.
- Resolution withholding: 25 out of 100
- Five Dragons' fate is rendered with finality. The novel reaches a clear, if bleak, conclusion.
- Structural complexity: 25 out of 100
- Chronological narrative spanning decades. Simple structure that serves the novel's focus on one man's relentless trajectory.
How Rice is regarded
Rice holds a literary regard score of 58 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.