The Book of Songs by Anonymous (Chinese Classical)
Published -600 · 55,000 words · about 5 hours at an average pace · Poetry, Classic Literature
How hard is The Book of Songs to read?
The Book of Songs scores 61 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: 80 out of 100
- The oldest layer of the Chinese language, thick with plant, animal and ritual names whose meanings are reconstructed and disputed.
- Sentence structure: 64 out of 100
- Short four-character lines with heavy repetition and refrain, simple in shape but full of particles whose function is uncertain.
- Abstraction: 42 out of 100
- Concrete songs about crops, soldiers, courtship and sacrifice, made abstract only by two thousand years of allegorical commentary.
- Information density: 62 out of 100
- Compressed songs assuming a whole vanished social world of clans, corvée, marriage rules and sacrifice.
- Narrative indirection: 68 out of 100
- Speaker and situation are almost never identified, so who is complaining and about what has been contested since the Han.
- Symbolic density: 72 out of 100
- The xing device opens a poem with ospreys or plum trees and leaves the connection to the human subject unstated, which is the origin of Chinese figurative practice.
- Ironic distance: 44 out of 100
- The songs themselves are direct; the irony lies in the gap between the plain complaints and the moralising readings imposed on them.
- Resolution withholding: 60 out of 100
- Songs break off without outcome, and the missing occasions mean many cannot be resolved even in principle.
- Structural complexity: 62 out of 100
- An anthology from many hands, states and centuries, whose received order is a Han editorial artefact and whose sections serve different functions.
How The Book of Songs is regarded
The Book of Songs holds a literary regard score of 83 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.