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

Author: Ben Blatt

Narrator: Vikas Adam

Unabridged: 5 hr 24 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 09/12/2017

Includes: Bonus Material Bonus Material Included


Synopsis

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 clichés? 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.

About Ben Blatt

Ben Blatt, a former staff writer for Slate and the Harvard Lampoon, has brought his fun approach to data journalism to topics such as Seinfeld, mapmaking, The Beatles, and Jeopardy!

His previous book, co-written with Eric Brewster, is 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.


Reviews

Goodreads review by ☘Misericordia☘ on March 31, 2019

Yes! Mouthwatering DS for readers. The ultimate pleasure for people enamored with: - data science, - stats, - history, - reading, - books, - writing... Numbers and words can work together, if you take it all in in a particular way! So, Neil Gaiman works with doors and coats, Palahniuk orgasms throughout hi......more

Goodreads review by Kathleen on March 16, 2017

This book, which uses data analysis to look at literature, is utterly fascinating and also very funny in places, like the chapter about cliches, which made me start laughing out loud in a crowded subway car. My only complaint is that it wasn't longer.......more

Goodreads review by Rebecca on January 16, 2018

I'm a big numbers geek, so this was an interesting peek into word usage analysis.......more