Keep Those Novels Simple, Stupid

Today I became aware of the fact that Amazon compiles statistics on the readability, complexity and length of some of its titles. This got me to thinking: how do the books that I like compare to the rest of Western literature? As my profile shows, my top 20 favourite fiction books are as follows:

1 Ulysses - James Joyce
2 King Lear - William Shakespeare
3 Paradise Lost - John Milton
4 Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell
5 Neuromancer - William Gibson
6 The Trial - Franz Kafka
7 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
8 Money - Martin Amis
9 Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
10 Vernon God Little - DBC Pierre
11 The Man Who Was Thursday - D.K. Chesterton
12 The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
13 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
14 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
15 Atomised - Michel Houellebecq
16 The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
17 Through the Looking Glass - Lewis Carroll
18 The Last Temptation of Christ - Nikos Kazantzakis
19 Waiting For Godot - Samuel Beckett
20 Cloudstreet - Tim Winton

The table below gives the median values for all of the top 20 books that I could find statistics on, and the percentage of fiction books which are below that value:

<<

Metric	Median Value of Top 20 Books	% of Fiction Books Below Median Value
Readability
Fog Index	8.7	37% are easier
Flesch Index	69.7	37% are easier
Flesch-Kincaid Index	6.1	25% are easier
Complexity
Complex Words	9%	48% have less
Words Per Sentence	12.5	26% have less
Length
Characters	462130	54% have less
Words	81208	55% have less
Sentences	5184	58% have less

So what have we learnt? Apparently I like books that are on the readable side, and not too complex. It may be that I’m a simple guy, but I’m going to take a stab that my preferences are fairly representative of the human population. I also seem to like books that are slightly on the longer side. In fact, if you consider my three favourite books as outliers – ‘Paradise Lost’ being an epic poem, ‘King Lear’ being a play, and ‘Ulysses’ being whatever it is – then the next four highest books – ‘1984’, ‘Neuromancer’, ‘The Trial’, and ‘Brave New World’ – are all pretty typical of my preferences. (Three of those are also science-fiction books set in the Earth’s future, but that’s a subject for another post.)

Since I’ve been struggling with Thomas Pynchon’s ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’ recently, I thought it would be interesting to see how that compares. Unsurprisingly, it’s more ‘unreadable’ and more complex than most of my favourite titles, although not overly so (‘Paradise Lost’ and ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ have it well beat in those departments). Where the trouble seems to be is length; it’s about 4 times as long as the median value of my top 20. Maybe that’s why I’ve only managed to get a quarter of the way through it.