Nabokov’s Favorite Word is Mauve: What the Numbers Reveal About the Classics, Bestsellers, and Our Own Writing

Nabokov’s Favorite Word is Mauve: What the Numbers Reveal About the Classics, Bestsellers, and Our Own Writing

Rating

7.0

The Pequod Review:

Ben Blatt's Nabokov’s Favorite Word is Mauve takes a fascinating and original approach to literature — namely, a data analysis of books to determine common patterns and language styles throughout the text. Blatt’s work is too cursory and he has an annoyingly unserious approach, but he still presents some useful information:

  • -- The best writers truly do use fewer adverbs.  Here are the number of adverbs used per 10,000 words:
    •   -- Ernest Hemingway: 80
    •   -- Mark Twain: 81
    •   -- Herman Melville: 126
    •   -- Jane Austen: 128
    •   -- J.K. Rowling: 140
    •   -- E.L. James: 155
    •   -- Furthermore, the best works of Steinbeck, Faulkner and Hemingway have a lower frequency of adverb usage than their best.
  • -- An algorithm can quite accurately identify a writer from his or her prose style (Blatt uses the real-world examples of the Federalist Papers and Stephen King, and then proves it with a computer analysis of the prose).
  • -- Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood and Mark Twain use the shortest first sentences (on average) while Salman Rushdie, Michael Chabon and Edith Wharton use the longest.
  • -- The general reading level of popular fiction (as measured by the Flesch-Kinkaid Grade Index) has in fact declined significantly. The percentage of NYT number one bestsellers written at an 8th Grade level or greater fell from 47% in the 1960s to 3% in the 1990s.

There remains to be a written a deeper and more analytical book on this subject, and one that uses a larger sample size.