City of Night by John Rechy
Published 1963 · 104,500 words · about 8 hours at an average pace
How hard is City of Night to read?
City of Night 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: 55 out of 100
- Street vocabulary against a heightened literary register.
- Sentence structure: 62 out of 100
- Long unpunctuated rushes with unconventional spacing.
- Abstraction: 55 out of 100
- Concrete hustling, reflectively framed.
- Information density: 58 out of 100
- A very large cast across many cities.
- Narrative indirection: 62 out of 100
- An unnamed narrator who never states his own desire.
- Symbolic density: 55 out of 100
- The city and the mask do sustained work.
- Ironic distance: 48 out of 100
- Some distance between the narrator's detachment and his need.
- Resolution withholding: 65 out of 100
- The ending offers no arrival.
- Structural complexity: 58 out of 100
- Episodic city by city, with portrait chapters between.
How City of Night is regarded
City of Night holds a literary regard score of 62 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.