Strange Beasts of China by Yan Ge
Published 2006 · 60,000 words · about 5 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Fantasy, Short Stories
How hard is Strange Beasts of China to read?
Strange Beasts of China 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: 54 out of 100
- A parody of zoological field-guide register with invented species names, set against colloquial Chengdu speech.
- Sentence structure: 48 out of 100
- Clean, cool sentences that alternate between taxonomic entry and first-person narration.
- Abstraction: 62 out of 100
- A sustained argument about categories, hybridity and belonging conducted through invented biology.
- Information density: 56 out of 100
- Nine species with their own rules, plus a running frame plot whose clues are planted inside the field-guide entries.
- Narrative indirection: 74 out of 100
- The narrator is a beast investigator who turns out to be implicated in what she classifies, and the professor withholds the frame from her and from the reader.
- Symbolic density: 76 out of 100
- Each species is a compact figure for a way of being unassimilable, and the book never converts the figures into statements.
- Ironic distance: 68 out of 100
- The deadpan taxonomic voice is applied to grief, sex and murder without ever changing register.
- Resolution withholding: 72 out of 100
- The professor's experiment and the narrator's own nature are half-revealed and the final chapter withdraws rather than explains.
- Structural complexity: 66 out of 100
- Nine self-contained bestiary chapters that turn out to constitute one concealed plot read in the right order.
How Strange Beasts of China is regarded
Strange Beasts of China holds a literary regard score of 56 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.