{"id":20509,"date":"2017-03-14T07:30:09","date_gmt":"2017-03-14T11:30:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/?p=20509"},"modified":"2017-03-14T07:30:09","modified_gmt":"2017-03-14T11:30:09","slug":"the-book-on-writing-im-currently-obsessed-with","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/?p=20509","title":{"rendered":"The Book I’m Currently Obsessed With"},"content":{"rendered":"

We are a nation governed by distraction; If You Give a Mouse a Cookie<\/em> could be our memoir–at least, our most benign one. Everyone I know complains of spending too much time online. They regret the minutes\u00a0and hours lost, but admit to getting\u00a0sucked down rabbit holes. We bemoan our lost book-reading time, but can’t resist the eddies of interest and tentacles of curiosity that Googling and link-hopping can provide. Fortunately, there’s a new book out that satisfies all of these tendencies\u2014it can be dipped into like a squirrel’s nut hoard, enjoyed a quick\u00a0nibble at a time,\u00a0or dived into headfirst, one fascinating tidbit leading to the next to the next to the next\u2014yet still\u00a0qualifies as literary.
\nThis new book I’m currently addicted to is called Nabokov’s Favorite Word Is Mauve: What the Numbers Reveal about the Classics, Bestsellers, and Our Own Writing<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>by Ben Blatt (Simon & Schuster). It’s an entertaining, list- and graph-filled, statistical look at what the words in\u00a0classic and contemporary literature reveal about writers, our attitudes toward writing, and the ways those are changing over time.
\n
\nIf you want evidence to back up your literary disdain of adverbs, you might find it here. It you want to know how to predict whether an anonymous writer is male or female, and how historically gender-related language\u00a0plays out in classic and popular literature\u00a0by the numbers, look no further. If you’re interested in how often certain\u00a0saucy words crop up in British vs. U.S. fanfiction or erotica, amusing\u00a0examples lie within.
\nBut the book isn’t simply a gathering of lists. There are conclusions to be drawn about our culture from our literary past and present. The author\u00a0looks at New York Times<\/em> bestselling titles across history, noting changes in patterns; it is telling, for instance, that the percentage of #1 NYT<\/em> bestsellers with a Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level greater than 8 has dropped from 47% in the 1960s to 3% in the 2010s. There are so many fascinating graphs like this throughout the book.
\nBeyond looking at our cultural tendencies, Blatt is interested in what word choices\u00a0reveal about their writers. Our words are as telling as our fingerprints. The mystery of who wrote The Federalist Papers<\/em> was solved not by literary or historical deduction, but by data: analyzing word usage that pointed a finger directly at the writer. Ben Blatt explores the use and relative value in literature of adverbs, exclamation points, thought verbs, qualifiers, similes, etc.. He explores “quiet” words and “loud” words, and compares British vs. American usage of these. He\u00a0provides analysis sure to make some of his exemplar authors squirm, noting their writerly tics\u2014favorite repetitive words, phrases, and more\u2014and their habits. Why is Salman Rushdie so fond of the words “flapping,” “eagles,” and “whores,” or Ray Bradbury so\u00a0tethered to “spearmint?” And why does Michael Connelly have to watch out for “nodding” as he writes?
\nThis is really the most delicious kind of rabbit hole. Blatt\u00a0even analyzes\u00a0the relative sizes of authors’ names on book jackets.
\nIt’s hard to include the\u00a0many different kinds of data and literary explorations are included\u00a0in Nabokov’s Favorite Word Is Mauve<\/em>. If you’re a writer, you won’t be able to resist it. If you know a writer, give this as a gift and\u00a0find yourself adored. I imagine it on Chelsea loft coffee tables and nightstands, ringed with coffee stains, and atop\u00a0writerly stacks, the first book of choice for procrastination.\u00a0This isn’t a book you read cover to cover; you devour it in tantalizing snippets.
\nBy now, you’ll\u00a0have noticed that this\u00a0isn’t a post about children’s books or children’s bookselling. That\u00a0should indicate how\u00a0far down this 288-page rabbit hole I’ve gone. I’ll see you next week when I re-emerge.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

‘Nabokov’s Favorite Word Is Mauve’: a new title for writers, numbers crunchers, Harper’s Index followers, and Hemingway fans.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20509","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20509","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20509"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20509\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20509"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20509"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20509"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}