The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations by Toni Morrison
Published 2019 · 368 pages · 95,000 words · about 7 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism, Nonfiction
How hard is The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations to read?
The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations scores 46 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: 48 out of 100
- Morrison writes in precise, literary diction — 'rememory,' 'Africanism,' and the title's own coinage of 'self-regard' against 'self-esteem' — but stays within an educated general reader's vocabulary rather than reaching for obscurity. It sits closer to The Great Gatsby's polish than to anything demanding a dictionary at hand.
- Sentence structure: 56 out of 100
- Her speeches and essays build long, cumulative sentences stacked with appositives and parallel clauses — the Nobel Lecture's extended parable of the blind woman and the birds runs across paragraphs before its grammar resolves. It asks sustained attention but never collapses into Faulknerian unpunctuated runs.
- Abstraction: 66 out of 100
- Pieces like the Nobel Lecture and the 'God's Language' section meditate on language, nationhood, and otherness as categories in themselves rather than narrating events, closer to the philosophical debates in The Brothers Karamazov than to memoir. Even personal pieces, like the eulogy for James Baldwin, quickly become arguments about art and mortality.
- Information density: 60 out of 100
- A single volume moves through American literary history (Poe, Twain, Faulkner), Beowulf, 1930s European fascism, and the September 11 attacks, each essay compressing a specific historical or textual case into a few pages. It's dense with reference but each piece stays focused on one argument at a time, unlike the encyclopedic sprawl of War and Peace.
How The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations is regarded
The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations holds a literary regard score of 65 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.