West with the Night by Beryl Markham
Published 1942 · 294 pages · 113,746 words · about 5 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Memoir & Autobiography, Nonfiction, Travel & Food
How hard is West with the Night to read?
West with the Night scores 21 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: 32 out of 100
- Literary vocabulary. African and aviation terminology.
- Sentence structure: 35 out of 100
- Abstraction: 22 out of 100
- Concrete, physical, sensory. Africa and sky.
- Information density: 42 out of 100
- Rich with incident, landscape, and character.
- Narrative indirection: 15 out of 100
- Non-chronological memoir. Thematic organization.
- Symbolic density: 22 out of 100
- Night as solitude. The west as challenge. Africa as home.
- Ironic distance: 12 out of 100
- Matter-of-fact about extraordinary courage.
- Resolution withholding: 12 out of 100
- Atlantic crossing is the climax. Memoir structure resists tidy closure.
- Structural complexity: 22 out of 100
- Non-linear chapters spanning childhood through Atlantic crossing.
How West with the Night is regarded
West with the Night holds a literary regard score of 51 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.