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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

Book Statistics

Quantum

18:35 / 07.11.06

Example; in How the Dead Live by Will Self, Fucking is the most used word with 241 occurrences, 75% of books are harder to read and it has a relatively high words-per-sentence count (14.9). Compared to literature and fiction only it's harder than most fiction to read, you can find out all kinds of pointless trivia.

I wonder what the most common word in Moby Dick is? Yup, 1,290 occurrences of 'Whale'. It's like a weird condensed poem of the book when you look at the list, I'm trying to think of the most fun ones to look up. Suggestions?

Tsuga

11:09 / 08.11.06

Okay, I tried my favorite, Gravity's Rainbow. Interesting word count, the most common being "now", "slothrop", and "down", but the readability and complexity indices? I'm not sure- though it definitely changed when you compare it to "literature and fiction" compared to "all categories". I'm unclear how they come up with that.
Thanks for the link; it's fun, I had no idea.I'm going to have to check out some more with this.

Quantum

14:07 / 08.11.06

I'm unclear how they come up with that.

I reckon the non-fiction stuff has a much higher complexity and difficulty rating because of all the IT and Biophysics textbooks & such. Not sure why fiction & lit would be so difficult though, maybe they have a big Chaucer section. 59% of lit/fic books are harder to read than Ulysses? Seems unlikely...

Kavboj

20:16 / 08.11.06

Well, this stats are only checking the words, not the structure of them in the sentences, which is logical, no computer can do that and you cannot judge the understanding of a sentence by one man, for one can understand the sentence and other cannot.

matthew.

00:22 / 09.11.06

I read something similar in Steven Pinker's book on language. Will go home and find the appropriate passage.

Quantum

18:42 / 27.11.06

Lovecraft gets some good results, Mountains of Madness has only 6% more difficult than it, and the biggest word is thing. Cool!

Not "Cyclopean"?

No, nor squamous or sussurating.