Mirkwood

Lorelle points to an interesting website called Juicy Studio, which has a facility for testing the readability of an electronic document. The main outputs of the test are three scores:

1. Gunning-Fog Index: Years of schooling needed to understand the text
2. Flesch Reading Ease: Ease of readability on a scale of 0-100
3. Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: The minimum grade-level of a student who can understand the text

Here are the results for Mirkwood:

For comparison on the Gunning-Fog score, the Reader’s Digest scores 8, The Wall-Street Journal scores about 11, academic papers score 15-20. Juicy Studio also mentions that writers are encouraged to write material with a Flesch Reading Ease Score of 60-70. Continue reading ‘A Readability Test’

I finished One Hundred Years of Solitude under an oak tree a few yards from a noisy fountain on a hot California evening. Gabriel García Márquez’s epic about the birth and ruin of the magical city of Macondo, had kept me awake until the small hours of the morning for the past few weeks. It was my first García Márquez novel and I found it completely unlike anything I have ever read. Now, after many nights of turning from side to side in the reading bed; in silent amazement at the excesses of the Buendías; angry shock at their misery, and - always - in bewilderment at the writer’s genius, the book has ended with a final horrible sting in its scorpion tail. I find myself deluged with events and symbolisms which merge somehow into a sweeping meditation on the human condition that not only pierces the heart, but gouges it out, and wrings it dry.

Surely, in this inebriated condition, the worst thing to do would be to write a review. Hence, I refrain.

Of all the books that sit unread on my shelf, there is only one that I could possibly choose now. It was inevitable… .

Related blog posts:

1. The color of forbidden passion
2. Savagery in One Hundred Years of Solitude