A Boy's Own Story by Edmund White
Published 1982 · 59,950 words · about 5 hours at an average pace
How hard is A Boy's Own Story to read?
A Boy's Own Story scores 58 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: 62 out of 100
- Rich, precise, deliberately literary.
- Sentence structure: 68 out of 100
- Long, elegant, carefully shaped sentences.
- Abstraction: 55 out of 100
- Concrete boyhood held at a considerable reflective distance.
- Information density: 52 out of 100
- Light on event.
- Narrative indirection: 55 out of 100
- An older narrator reshaping his younger self.
- Symbolic density: 55 out of 100
- The lake, the school and the father carry weight.
- Ironic distance: 62 out of 100
- Steady distance between the boy's wishes and the man's judgement.
- Resolution withholding: 58 out of 100
- The ending is a betrayal left unexplained.
- Structural complexity: 55 out of 100
- Non-chronological, moving freely between years.
How A Boy's Own Story is regarded
A Boy's Own Story holds a literary regard score of 68 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.