Surviving James Dean by William Bast
Published 2006 · 320 pages · 88,000 words · about 4 hours at an average pace · Memoir & Autobiography, Biography, Nonfiction
How hard is Surviving James Dean to read?
Surviving James Dean 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: 28 out of 100
- A celebrity memoir by a television writer, it most likely uses plain, conversational language. It sits near the accessible contemporary prose of Beach Read rather than any literary-register novel.
- Sentence structure: 28 out of 100
- Memoir prose of this kind runs on direct, readable sentences. The structure resembles the clear diary-like syntax of Anne Frank's diary more than any ornate stylist.
- Abstraction: 30 out of 100
- The book centres on a concrete relationship with a real person and events in Hollywood and New York. It is personal and grounded, like It Ends with Us in its directness.
- Information density: 30 out of 100
- At about 88,000 words it recounts a five-year friendship and its aftermath at a comfortable pace. Density is light, comparable to Beach Read.
How Surviving James Dean is regarded
Surviving James Dean holds a literary regard score of 21 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.