settingshadow reviewed Nabokov's Favorite Word Is Mauve by Ben Blatt
Review of "Nabokov's Favorite Word Is Mauve" on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
If you read enough (and if you're reading this, you probably do), books become fascinating independent of the stories they tell. Blatt takes a math-y approach to this, quantitating a number of variables to answer different literary questions, such as the percentage of co-written books actually written by the more famous author, the difference between "literary" and genre fiction and the difference in word choice over time. There's some mission creep as chapters also reflect on how male versus female authors write the different genders and what that means, and also an introduction about who really wrote the Federalist Papers. It's mostly just fun -- can you deduce from an unbiased statistical approach that Nabakov was obsessed with colors, probably because he was a synesthete? -- and pretty light on the math. I'm pretty opposed to frequentist statistics, but it was still pretty bizarre to me to not have a …
If you read enough (and if you're reading this, you probably do), books become fascinating independent of the stories they tell. Blatt takes a math-y approach to this, quantitating a number of variables to answer different literary questions, such as the percentage of co-written books actually written by the more famous author, the difference between "literary" and genre fiction and the difference in word choice over time. There's some mission creep as chapters also reflect on how male versus female authors write the different genders and what that means, and also an introduction about who really wrote the Federalist Papers. It's mostly just fun -- can you deduce from an unbiased statistical approach that Nabakov was obsessed with colors, probably because he was a synesthete? -- and pretty light on the math. I'm pretty opposed to frequentist statistics, but it was still pretty bizarre to me to not have a p-value, or really any numbers at all, in a statistics book. Nonetheless, reading about reading is always extra fun and I enjoyed it quite a bit.
