The Boys of Summer by Roger Kahn
Published 1972 · 474 pages · 130,000 words · about 9 hours at an average pace · Arts & Culture, History, Memoir & Autobiography, Nonfiction
How hard is The Boys of Summer to read?
The Boys of Summer scores 23 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it relatively accessible. 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: 28 out of 100
- Baseball terminology. Literary but accessible.
- Sentence structure: 32 out of 100
- Abstraction: 25 out of 100
- Concrete narrative. Meaning embedded in stories.
- Information density: 45 out of 100
- Dense with personal detail and baseball history.
- Narrative indirection: 15 out of 100
- Two-part structure creates retrospective irony.
- Symbolic density: 22 out of 100
- The Dodgers as symbol of American possibility and loss.
- Ironic distance: 18 out of 100
- Nostalgia tempered by clear-eyed observation of decline.
- Resolution withholding: 15 out of 100
- The players' decline provides melancholy rather than closure.
- Structural complexity: 25 out of 100
- Two-part structure: glory and aftermath.
How The Boys of Summer is regarded
The Boys of Summer holds a literary regard score of 50 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.