The Great Railway Bazaar by Paul Theroux
Published 1975 · 372 pages · 85,000 words · about 6 hours at an average pace · Memoir & Autobiography, Nonfiction, Travel & Food
How hard is The Great Railway Bazaar to read?
The Great Railway Bazaar scores 21 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: 30 out of 100
- Literary vocabulary. Place names from many languages.
- Sentence structure: 30 out of 100
- Abstraction: 22 out of 100
- Concrete observation. Minimal theorizing.
- Information density: 45 out of 100
- Dense with character, landscape, and cultural detail.
- Narrative indirection: 100 out of 100
- Linear journey. Station by station.
- Symbolic density: 15 out of 100
- The train as metaphor for passage through the world.
- Ironic distance: 25 out of 100
- Acerbic, judgmental, self-aware.
- Resolution withholding: 100 out of 100
- Returns home. Circular journey.
- Structural complexity: 20 out of 100
- Episodic chapters following the rail route.
How The Great Railway Bazaar is regarded
The Great Railway Bazaar 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.