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TBR TAKEDOWN: GOODREADS, WEEK 7b
Nabokov's Favorite Word is Mauve: What the Numbers Reveal About the Classics, Bestsellers, and Our Own Writing by Ben Blatt
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I'm trying to trim down my tbr list(s) and I'm asking for your help! Descriptions and more info under the cut. Please reblog and add your thoughts!
« Classic [and modern] literature by men is about men by a quantifiable and overwhelming margin. Classic literature by women is about women more than men, but it’s within a short distance of an even split.
• Of the 50 classic books by men, 44 used he more than she and 6 did the opposite. • Of the 50 classic books by women, 29 used she more than he and 21 did the opposite. • Of the 50 recent New York Times bestsellers by men, 45 used he more than she and 5 did the opposite. • Of the 50 recent New York Times bestsellers by women, 17 used she more than he and 33 did the opposite.
Saying most authors just prefer to write about their own gender would be an oversimplification. The most female-focused books are nowhere near as lopsided as the extreme male-focused books. The Prime of Miss Brodie was 21% he and 79 % she. That’s the extreme example on the female side. Meanwhile, a book with the opposite split—79 % he and 21 % she—is in the middle of the pack on the male side. There are twenty books with more extreme male ratios. [...] And once again, in the New York Times bestseller list and the modern literary sample, no female writer ever went so extreme as to use less than 20 % he. The same cannot be said of male writers. »
— Ben Blatt, Nabokov's Favorite Word Is Mauve
Writers are told to “write what you know,” so perhaps it would follow that men write more books about men than about women, and women write more books about women than about men.
NABOKOV’S FAVOURITE WORD IS MAUVE by Ben Blatt was an interesting and compelling, easily readable work that uses statistical methods to study questions of literature. Should you really not use too many adverbs in your writing? Can you tell the difference on a statistical level between a writer and their cowriter—what about between an author and fanfiction authors emulating the original work? How can you figure out the favorite words of different writers, and are they what the writers themselves would predict? What does the gendered use of “screamed” and “killed” tell us about how our society views gender? Blatt’s book is experimental, and its conclusions are fascinating. Blatt does a good job of mediating his conclusions with full disclosure about subjectivity and his datasets, and he finds truly interesting facts between the lines of his data. This book is compelling for any literature fan, and goes by quickly.
For many of us, novels are a portal, a way of exploring the broader world and understanding how people act within it. We live in a world where one in two people are women. There's no reason to think that every novel must be in lockstep with this ratio, especially if the setting is unique. But if you are a reader and every book you read doesn't even achieve a one-in-FOUR ratio, chances are you're not getting a true reflection of, or gaining a true appreciation for, how other people act in the world.
Ben Blatt, Nabokov's Favorite Word is Mauve
Ben Blatt, Growing Pains (Deep Water), watercolor, gouache, ink on paper [image source]
To write his new book, Nabokov's Favorite Word is Mauve, journalist and statistician Ben Blatt loaded thousands of classics and contemporary best-sellers into various databases and let his hard drive churn through them. He wanted to know if our favorite authors follow conventional writing advice about cliches, adverbs and exclamation points (they mostly do); if men and women write differently (yep); if an algorithm can identify a writer from his or her prose style (it can); and which authors use the shortest first sentences versus those who use the longest.
We can hear thousands of monocles dropping into thousands of cups of Earl Grey from here. "But what of literature?" you sputter. "What does any of that technical folderol have to do," — here you start wiping your monocle on your nosegay — "with ART?"
Not much, is the answer. Blatt's book isn't terribly interested in the art of writing. What it is fascinated by — and what’s fascinating about it — is the craft of writing. Here are some of our favorites of Blatt's findings.
A statistical analysis shows a clear gender divide in the words that novelists use to describe their characters
Our fictional universe also turns out to contain words that male authors use to describe female characters but which a woman would rarely use to describe herself or another woman. These words seem to highlight the biggest differences in how male and female authors view the world.
One key word here: interrupted. In each of our three categories (classics, popular fiction and literary fiction), male writers are at least 75% more likely to have their female characters interrupt than their male ones. Meanwhile, female authors didn’t discernibly differ in the frequency with which they have their characters of both genders interrupt.
Similarly, female authors use sob at about the same rate for their male and female characters—but male writers hardly ever use it to describe their own male characters. Male authors seem, consciously or not, to hold that if “real men don’t cry,” then “fictional men don’t sob.”
Really interesting article. If the link doesn’t work for you, try clinking through this twitter post: https://twitter.com/jessesheidlower/status/842400218922508288
