Shoe Dog by Phil Knight
Published 2016 · 432 pages · 95,000 words · about 6 hours at an average pace · Biography, Business & Self-Help, Memoir & Autobiography, Nonfiction
How hard is Shoe Dog to read?
Shoe Dog scores 18 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: 22 out of 100
- Everyday vocabulary. Business terms minimal.
- Sentence structure: 25 out of 100
- Abstraction: 20 out of 100
- Concrete personal narrative throughout.
- Information density: 42 out of 100
- Rich with detail and business history.
- Narrative indirection: 100 out of 100
- Chronological memoir with reflective asides.
- Symbolic density: 12 out of 100
- Running as metaphor for the entrepreneurial journey.
- Ironic distance: 15 out of 100
- Self-aware about the costs of obsession.
- Resolution withholding: 12 out of 100
- Success achieved but at personal cost.
- Structural complexity: 20 out of 100
- Chronological memoir. Clear structure.
How Shoe Dog is regarded
Shoe Dog holds a literary regard score of 41 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.