NABOKOV'S FAVORITE WORD IS MAUVE What the Numbers Reveal About the Classics, Bestsellers, and Our Own Writing

Sad to say, not every title adapts readily to the audio format. Blatt's statistical analysis of the words used by different authors promises to be a hoot, and often is. And it offers a number of not-so-predictable insights into differences in gender, era, literary standing, and, most interestingly, authors' professed principles of style, which they often violate in practice. Narrator Vikas Adam does a superlative job with a difficult text, one interrupted every two minutes by a reference to the PDF files, most of them statistical tables. For easier listening, one can easily skip those files and still enjoy the narrative, which has its own unique highlights and surprises. D.A.W. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine [Published: OCTOBER 2017]