The Way West by A.B. Guthrie
Published 1950 · 316 pages · 89,000 words · about 10 hours at an average pace · Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction
How hard is The Way West to read?
The Way West scores 53 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: 55 out of 100
- Frontier vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 55 out of 100
- Clear historical.
- Abstraction: 55 out of 100
- Journey, community.
- Information density: 60 out of 100
- Oregon Trail.
- Narrative indirection: 52 out of 100
- Third person.
- Symbolic density: 55 out of 100
- West, journey.
- Ironic distance: 48 out of 100
- Engaged adventure.
- Resolution withholding: 48 out of 100
- Journey ends.
- Structural complexity: 52 out of 100
- Trail narrative.
How The Way West is regarded
The Way West holds a literary regard score of 59 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.