Women by Annie Leibovitz
Published 2000 · 256 pages · 70,400 words · about 4 hours at an average pace · Nonfiction, Essays & Criticism, Feminist Literature
How hard is Women to read?
Women scores 31 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
- The book is carried by photographs, with Sontag's essay the only sustained prose. Her vocabulary is educated but clear, more accessible than the dense literary registers of Nabokov and closer to The Great Gatsby in difficulty.
- Sentence structure: 38 out of 100
- Sontag writes controlled, medium-length sentences with some subordinate clauses. The remainder is captions and images, so the demands are far lighter than in a novel like Anna Karenina.
- Abstraction: 42 out of 100
- Sontag's essay reflects on how women are seen and represented, which is abstract, but the photographs ground it in specific faces, jobs and places. It sits near Atomic Habits in concreteness overall.
- Information density: 28 out of 100
- Images are absorbed quickly and the text is brief, so little information competes for attention per page. Density is closer to light reading than to the layered texture of Lolita.
How Women is regarded
Women holds a literary regard score of 52 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.