Review: 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 by Ben Blatt
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I work in software, with systems created to manage electronic content and to handle eDiscovery and searches. One of the capabilities of these kinds of systems is the ability to make content available for analysis through analytics. I’ve seen users of these system do some interesting things in evaluating their content to, for example, find relationships between emails, but I hadn’t seen many good uses of text analytics for researching regular, old documents. That’s what this book does. There are dozens of examples described analyzing mostly books, comparing, for instance, uses of different words over time, and comparing different authors in word usage. The first example, analysis of the Federalist papers to determine the original author based on word usage, was a great introduction to how this kind of analysis can impact our understanding of history. Many of the other examples didn’t aim quite so high, providing ways to compare authors to others, or compare an author’s early work to their later work. There were also examples comparing the size of an author’s name on book covers compared to their co-writers or compared to their own books as the author became more popular. Along the way, you learn that Danielle Steele and James Patterson’s writing stands out for, to me, unexpected reasons. I found this an interesting book if you are interested in books and authors.

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