The Swimming-Pool Library by Alan Hollinghurst
Published 1988 · 83,600 words · about 7 hours at an average pace
How hard is The Swimming-Pool Library to read?
The Swimming-Pool Library 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: 68 out of 100
- Rich, precise, occasionally arch vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 68 out of 100
- Long, elegant, carefully balanced sentences.
- Abstraction: 55 out of 100
- Concrete social observation carrying an argument about history and complicity.
- Information density: 60 out of 100
- Dense in detail — architecture, class markers, bodies.
- Narrative indirection: 55 out of 100
- Will narrates with confidence and very little self-knowledge, which the reader has to supply.
- Symbolic density: 58 out of 100
- The pool, the Corinthian Club and the diaries all carry a double weight.
- Ironic distance: 72 out of 100
- The distance between Will's blitheness and what the novel knows is sustained from start to finish.
- Resolution withholding: 55 out of 100
- The historical revelation lands, but Will's reckoning with it does not.
- Structural complexity: 55 out of 100
- A present-day narrative braided with a 1920s diary.
How The Swimming-Pool Library is regarded
The Swimming-Pool Library holds a literary regard score of 77 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.