Nabokov's Favorite Word Is Mauve: What The Numbers Reveal About The Classics, Bestsellers, And Our Own Writing

"Statistician Ben Blatt loaded thousands of books – classics and contemporary best-sellers – into various databases and let his hard drive churn through them, seeking to determine, for example, if our favorite authors follow conventional writing advice about using 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 (Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood, Mark Twain) versus those who use the longest (Salman Rushdie, Michael Chabon, Edith Wharton). It’s a thin slice, looking at literature in this knowingly reductive way. It doesn’t tell you everything, and of course it doesn’t give you a true sense of the feeling you get when you read for yourself. But what it often succeeds in capturing, with astonishing clarity, is your feelings about these authors."