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    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
    Nabokov's Favorite Word Is Mauve: What the Numbers Reveal About the Classics, Bestsellers, and Our Own Writing
    Audiobook5 hours

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

    Written by Ben Blatt

    Narrated by Vikas Adam

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    In Nabokov's Favorite Word Is Mauve, statistician and journalist Ben Blatt brings big data to the literary canon, exploring the wealth of fun findings that remain hidden in the works of the world's greatest writers. He assembles a database of thousands of books and hundreds of millions of words, and starts asking the questions that have intrigued curious word nerds and book lovers for generations: What are our favorite authors' favorite words? Do men and women write differently? Are bestsellers getting dumber over time? Which bestselling writer uses the most cliches? What makes a great opening sentence? How can we judge a book by its cover? And which writerly advice is worth following or ignoring?

    Blatt draws upon existing analysis techniques and invents some of his own. All of his investigations and experiments are original, conducted himself, and no math knowledge is needed to understand the results. This eye-opening book will provide you with a new appreciation for your favorite authors and a fresh perspective on your own writing, illuminating both the patterns that hold great prose together and the brilliant flourishes that make it unforgettable.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateSep 12, 2017
    ISBN9781541478060
    Author

    Ben Blatt

    Ben Blatt is a former staff writer for Slate and The Harvard Lampoon who has taken his fun approach to data journalism to topics such as Seinfeld, mapmaking, The Beatles, and Jeopardy! He is the author of Nabokov’s Favorite Word Is Mauve and, with Eric Brewster, the coauthor of I Don’t Care if We Never Get Back, which follows the duo’s quest to go on the mathematically optimal baseball road trip, traveling 20,000 miles to a game in all thirty ballparks in thirty days without planes. Blatt’s work has also been published in The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, and Deadspin.

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    Reviews for Nabokov's Favorite Word Is Mauve

    4/5

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    • 3/5
      A discussion of data analysis of mostly famous authors' texts that asks questions like, Can one identify a book's author by the frequency of the words that they use? Do men and women write differently? Do authors follow their own writing advice? How do book covers change as the author becomes more famous? etc. A nice compendium of this kind of thing.
    • 4/5
      This was a fun read. I never expected to find myself chuckling over a statistical report, or staying up past my bedtime to finish a chapter, but I did both for this one.
    • 5/5
      This is not exactly the book I was expecting it to be. I sort of thought it would be a quick read full of fun facts about various books and authors, and it is, but it's, you know, full of math and statistics. I hate math, but not nearly as much as I hate statistics. This book is cover to cover statistics, and uses foul words like median and average; it even includes a formula. But like any good writer, Blatt had me glued to the pages anyway, because 1.) he didn't get bogged down defining the data sets (he put those in the notes), 2.) he made all the information easy to understand, 3.) he always reminded the reader that correlation is NOT causation and maintained an admirable objectivity, even when he admitted his biases, and 4.) the information he pulled out was fascinating. So many of the chapters had MT (who was patient about being read to) and I debating for hours about Blatt's results, often with him saying "yeah, but is he accounting for ..." and me breaking in with "oh! wait! here he goes on to address that..." I've learned oodles from this book. For example, while I knew I used too many exclamation points (a fact validated by the math), I apparently also use too many -ly adverbs. I never knew avoiding them is considered a 'rule' to good writing. Ditto with qualifiers: quite, rather, somewhat, etc. That's going to be a harder habit to break than the exclamation points, as I often depend on those to soften statements I make that I worry can be taken badly. (I'm keeping that last adverb, dammit.) Chapter 2 looks at identifying gender through writing, and it was interesting and a little depressing. There's a lot of information here that might get stuck in some people's craw, but Blatt maintains a very respectful, objective voice throughout - he's just the messenger of the data, even when he doesn't think it's as meaningful as others might; he's quick to point out that the results have as much to do with the content's subject as they do with author style. The only part that bothered me was that this level of sophisticated analysis is being used for user profiling and targeted marketing. Of course it is. Chapter 3 talks about using common words to identify authorship and it's a step beyond fascinating. I could not stop reading this chapter - the results are awe inspiring. The whole book is just a rich mine of information about what the best sellers and award winners have in common, how fan fiction quantitatively differs from published fiction and even how US writing differs from UK writing. And yes, there's a whole section on the favorite and fallback words of famous authors. (Teaser: 2 of Agatha Christie's favourites are inquest and alibi. I know; you're shocked.) This is a book on statistics, but it uses books as its data sets, and Blatt writes well, so that makes it not only o.k., but cool. It should appeal to math lovers and book lovers. Math loving bibliophiles might find heaven between the covers.
    • 3/5
      As someone with a background in linguistics and an interest in data science, I really wanted to like this book more than I did. The data that Blatt chose to look at is interesting, but he has an unfortunate habit of drawing grand conclusions about gender, nationality, and authorship based on limited data sets as well as not clearly separating causation from correlation. I did enjoy chapter 3 ("Searching for Fingerprints"), but I think it's telling that that chapter is devoted to a methodology developed by other researchers (statisticians Frederick Mosteller and David Wallace). Ultimately this book is weak from both a humanities perspective and a data perspective.
    • 5/5
      This book attempts to discern what it is that makes writing great. I thoroughly enjoyed the analytical viewpoint.
    • 4/5
      Ben Blatt uses statistics to find patterns in the way that writers use words in their novels -- everything from bestsellers to literary award winners to Harry Potter fanfiction -- in an attempt to answer, or at least address, a number of different questions: Can computer analyses help resolve questions of disputed authorship? (Answer: a pretty firm yes, at least when you've got a limited number of authors to pick from.) Do authors who insist good writing involves eschewing adverbs follow their own advice, and are novels with fewer adverbs in fact more successful? Do women use some words more often than men, and vice versa? Are great first sentences more likely to be long or short? And so forth and so on.I think a lot of the conclusions here need to be taken with a good-sized grain of salt, especially when they edge into the realm of writing advice. It's not at all difficult to see ways in which the data under consideration can be kind of ratty, or the algorithms lacking in nuance. But, to his credit, Blatt does make a point of acknowledging the limitations of what this kind of analysis tells us. Really, mostly I think he's just having fun playing around with this stuff and thinking up questions to investigate. Which is fair enough, and it's interesting to see what he and his algorithms come up with. But maybe only mildly interesting. I have to say, I did find the book as a whole less engaging than I expected to, partly, perhaps, because there really is a limit to how much insight one can actually get out of this sort of thing, and partly because Blatt's own prose, while clear enough, isn't going to win any of those literary awards itself.
    • 4/5
      3.5 What a fascinating book. Using math computations to find out who wrote something, who uses the least adverbs, thought verbs and other markers that makes ones writing their own. Different authors, different word choices, even punctuation all make a difference. Found it interesting that even authors who write a different genre under a different name such as Rowling can be identified. That though the name changes the writing does not. Words women authors use more often than men and visa versa. Changes between classic novels and modern fiction word usage.Male authors use the word cheap more than females authors. Other words too, though this word stuck in my mind because just before I read that part my hubby and I had been talking about a male friend our ours who was excessively frugal. Cheap! Another thought that stuck is that the State the Union address has apparently sunk to a new intellectual low. Wonder why? Many, many graphs, comparisons, but such a different book. It has made me very aware of my writing, need to watch the overuse of adverbs and qualifiers. Though I see I have once again over used qualifiers. Well, as they say Rome wasn't built in a day.
    • 4/5
      Math and literature don't mix. Or so we thought in high school. Or in college. Or five minutes ago. Ben Blatt proves differently in “Nabokov's Favorite Word Is Mauve: What the Numbers Reveal about the Classics, Bestsellers, and Our Own Writing.”Now that most books have been digitalized it has become a fairly easy process to study word usage over the centuries. This is how lexicographers now determine when individual words first appeared in print. Blatt applies the same techniques to literature and comes up with a number of fascinating discoveries.Adverbs: The novels generally considered to rank among the best tend to have fewer adverbs than lesser books.Exclamation points: James Joyce, often considered one of the best novelists, used lots of exclamation points. Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner, also highly regarded, used very few.Suddenly: Elmore Leonard said writers should never use the word suddenly. He didn't, at least after he included that as one of his rules of writing. Early in his career, however, he used that word frequently.Cliches: Some writers employ numerous clichés in their work (James Patterson, for example) and others use few (Jane Austen), but all writers have their favorites. Tom Clancy: "by a whisker." Faulkner: "sooner or later." Donna Tartt: "too good to be true." Patterson: "believe it or not." Austen: "with all my heart."As for Vladimir Nabokov and the color mauve, it seems that the author of “Lolita” tended to think and write in color, and of the many colors represented in his work, mauve was his favorite. Ray Bradbury, on the other hand, was inspired by the spice rack and by tastes in general. Words like spearmint, nutmeg, lemon, onion and vanilla show up frequently in his stories. But his favorite flavor was cinnamon.Often a reader's response to Blatt's findings will be an insolent "so what?" He can make a big deal about very little. Still this is an informative book that reveals how each writer's style is his own, right down to individual word choices and even punctuation choices. If you are a writer thinking about writing a new series of books using a pseudonym, forget about it. Ben Blatt, or someone like him, will track you down.It's all in the numbers.
    • 4/5
      It is a simple premise -- use modern statistical techniques to data mine for patterns in classic and modern literature. The method is applied over and over, but Ben Blatt's writing style keeps a potentially dull subject from getting too dry. Instead, he poses several fascinating questions and provides evidence to address those questions.Blatt draws short of drawing much in the way of conclusions from his research, but as he takes pains to point out, his method gives evidence and not proof. The reader can make their own conclusions. And if you're like me, you'll want to take his method out for a spin yourself.
    • 4/5
      This was a fun book about books and statistics. The author digs into what the words chosen by authors can tell us about the writing process, gender, the success of the novel, and our own stereotypes. Bookworm will likely love this book - many classics are discussed and authorial mysteries revealed, and yes, Blatt displays why mauve is Nabokov's favorite word. Fun reading!
    • 4/5
      Fascinating look at how science and math can dissect writing, both new and old. Perhaps writers should read this, especially those using many cliches. The book might lead to more creativity or at least an awareness of a writing style and tendencies. I've never read anything like this and it feels like an important book for writers and those teaching writing. Many fun facts.
    • 4/5
      A slim volume, and uneven, but I very much enjoyed the bulk of it. And I learned a lot.