Any Human Heart by William Boyd
Published 2002 · 498 pages · 124,500 words · about 8 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction
How hard is Any Human Heart to read?
Any Human Heart scores 47 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: 40 out of 100
- 20th-century vocabulary spanning decades and continents.
- Sentence structure: 40 out of 100
- Diary form with varying styles across eras.
- Abstraction: 45 out of 100
- Questions of identity and how a life is lived.
- Information density: 55 out of 100
- Dense with 20th-century history and art world.
- Narrative indirection: 45 out of 100
- Diary form limits perspective; gaps exist.
- Symbolic density: 50 out of 100
- The century, the heart, the journals carry weight.
- Ironic distance: 50 out of 100
- Boyd maintains knowing distance from Logan.
- Resolution withholding: 45 out of 100
- Life completes but meaning remains to be drawn.
- Structural complexity: 50 out of 100
- Diary spanning entire 20th century.
How Any Human Heart is regarded
Any Human Heart holds a literary regard score of 59 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.