Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst
Published 2024 · 136,400 words · about 11 hours at an average pace
How hard is Our Evenings to read?
Our Evenings scores 60 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: 65 out of 100
- Rich, socially precise vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 68 out of 100
- Long, elegant sentences.
- Abstraction: 58 out of 100
- Concrete social observation carrying an argument about class and race in England.
- Information density: 60 out of 100
- Dense period detail across seventy years.
- Narrative indirection: 55 out of 100
- A retrospective narrator with obvious blind spots.
- Symbolic density: 55 out of 100
- The theatre and the scholarship carry weight.
- Ironic distance: 68 out of 100
- Sustained distance between what Dave sees and what the reader does.
- Resolution withholding: 62 out of 100
- The ending is abrupt and violent, and explains nothing.
- Structural complexity: 55 out of 100
- Linear across a life, with jumps.
How Our Evenings is regarded
Our Evenings holds a literary regard score of 49 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.