August by Knut Hamsun
Published 1930 · 441 pages · 364,367 words · about 23 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction
How hard is August to read?
August scores 41 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
- Clear contemporary prose.
- Sentence structure: 38 out of 100
- Accessible sentences.
- Abstraction: 40 out of 100
- Questions through experience.
- Information density: 40 out of 100
- Efficiently told.
- Narrative indirection: 45 out of 100
- Shows rather than tells.
- Symbolic density: 45 out of 100
- The month, heat carry weight.
- Ironic distance: 40 out of 100
- Balanced perspective.
- Resolution withholding: 45 out of 100
- Open questions remain.
- Structural complexity: 35 out of 100
- Straightforward narrative.
How August is regarded
August holds a literary regard score of 55 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.