Red Dragon vs Three Lives: Which Should You Read?
Both live on shelves: Fiction
Red Dragon
“WILL GRAHAM SAT Crawford down at a picnic table between the house and the ocean and gave him a glass of iced tea.”
Red Dragon is a novel by American author Thomas Harris, first published in 1981. The plot follows former FBI profiler Will Graham, who comes out of retirement to find and apprehend an enigmatic serial-killer nicknamed…
1 film adaptation
vs
Three Lives
Gertrude Stein, as a college student at Radcliffe and a medical student at Johns Hopkins Medical School, was a privileged woman, but she was surrounded by women who were trapped by poverty, class, and race into lives…
The verdict
- Readers rate Red Dragon highest: Red Dragon 4.1 · Three Lives 3.1.
- Three Lives is the quickest read — about 5 hours vs 7 for Red Dragon.
- Red Dragon has the widest readership — 383128 ratings behind its score.
How to choose
Scores by source
| Red Dragon | Three Lives | |
|---|---|---|
| Goodreads | 4.1 (383128) | 3.1 (4678) |
| Hardcover | 4.0 (578) | 3.0 (1) |
| Google Books | 4.5 (2) | — |
| Apple Books | 4.5 (1077) | 2.0 (8) |
Reception
| Red Dragon | Three Lives | |
|---|---|---|
| Ratings | 383128 | 4678 |
| Editions | 60 | 149 |
| Citations | — | 2 |
| Film adaptations | 1 | 1 |
| Want to read | 240914 | 7460 |
| Reading it now | 8787 | 366 |
| Written reviews | 10538 | 540 |
| Wikipedia attention | 28249 | 779 |
| Pages | 415 | 299 |