Nabokov’s Favourite Word is Mauve by Ben Blatt: book review

Nabokov’s Fabourite Word is Mauve: The Literary Quirks and Oddities of our Most-Loved Authors (2017) is an analytical – mathematical and statistical – study on the use of words in fictional books. Does a word count of specific words (the frequency of words) distinguish one best-selling book from another? Does each author have a stylistic footprint?

Blatt analyzed authors and books – thousands of them, from classics to best-sellers to fan fiction novels – to determine some interesting and fun statistics. Using statistics, he answers questions such as: do writers follow their own advice (such as not using the word ‘very’ or exclamation marks!), which novelists use cliches the most, and which authors start their novels with a sentence about the weather?

Which author uses the shortest sentences? Which author uses the most adverbs? Do male and female authors use different words? Which author uses ‘loud’ words most often, and which author uses ‘quiet’ words most frequently? Can we judge a book by the size of the author’s name on the front cover?

What are Ernest Hemingway’s top ten most popular three-word sentences? Or Jane Austen’s? Who wrote the most sentences with ‘not’ in them?

From narratives to charts to graphs, the data covers a vast amount of information. I particularly like the way Blatt conducts trend analyses to determine changes in writing styles over several decades – for genres as well as individual authors.

I also liked his research on the grade levels of author’s books. For example, Blatt finds that the grade level of best-selling novels has decreased in the past 50 years from an average 8th grade reading level to 6th grade. For books of the 1960s that he analyzed, 47% of them had a Flesch-Kincaid grade level score greater than 8th grade, and in 2010 it was only 3% of books with a reading level greater than 8th grade. Have books become ‘dumber’ or have they become more accessible (and targeted to) everyone? Blatt concludes that ‘Simple can be great. It includes more people.’ He adds that the 2014 Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction, The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt, was also a number one best-seller and has a ‘reasonable’ reading level of grade 7.2. So, ‘writing doesn’t need to be complicated to be considered either powerful or literary.’

Blatt does concede that his methods of analysis aren’t perfect – and he does provide the workings of his mathematical method and a list of all of the books he analyzed. Nevertheless, it is a fresh view of analyzing content – not just by emotions and the strength of the English language, but also by numbers, charts, and graphs.

MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of:- The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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