some computers have too much time on their hands

[ellenkushner]

Did you know that there are now concordances on amazon.com??!

I mean, as in: "These are the 100 most frequently-used words in this book" ??!

You can look them all up for The Fall of the Kings - you can also learn that the book has 157,212 words (though they seem to be counting the running heads as words, so subtract about 1,000), averaging 12.5 words/sentence, and can be read by someone with an 8th grade education (oh, ha! and double-ha! Many of the online reviews imply that even people with college degrees couldn't actually figure out what's going on in it) - And then you can click on an individual word and see all the actual sentences in the text it appears in - with page references!

But you already knew that, didn't you?

OK, but did you know it can also be made into a lovely little poem? It begins:

again arlen asked basil blake book
boy came campion city cloud
come crabbe days delia doctor door down ellen
even eyes face fall finn fremont friends
galing get go godwin
going good
great hair hand head henry himself

- or maybe you can just fill in the words in between these most-common ones, and write your own damn version of the novel, if you don't like the way we did it (fuming about stoopid review, even though I really do know better).

Swordspoint rates almost the same for Readability and Complexity - including words/sentence! - which will please Delia, since she was consciously trying to copy my style.

In its concordance, I particularly like the sequence:

get go going good got halliday

- kinda sums it all up, doesn't it?

It makes me sad that Thomas the Rhymer has no concordance.

Comments

[redbird]

Many computers have too much time on their hands. This is a better use for it than many--I'm all in favor of distributed SETI and protein folding research and such, but does it need to draw silly pictures while it does so? (Screen savers are a solution that caught on shortly before the problem was solved in hardware.)

[burgundy.livejournal.com]

Many of the online reviews imply that even people with college degrees couldn't actually figure out what's going on in it

Reading customer reviews on Amazon always makes me a little sad, except when it makes me a lot irritated. Sometimes I wonder if maybe the publisher isn't playing some kind of trick on us, and what I've read is actually a completely different book.

You can also make a fun haiku using just the words in large bold print:
Alec Ferris hand
Horn know lord man Michael now
Richard said St Vier

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

make a fun

Coolness!

[suzanna-o.livejournal.com]

That is very cool.

[lapillus]

It makes me sad that Thomas the Rhymer has no concordance.

Yet.

You never now when the computers will get bored again. ;-)

[auroramama]

It's good to see that you aren't adversely affected by the concordance, like the character in one of David Lodge's novels who is temporarily blocked after he learns that his writing is larded with variations on "grease". (The deliberation with which words are used in the Riverside novels makes it seem unlikely you'd be surprised at the frequency of any of them.)

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

Thank you for that graceful compliment.

[deire.livejournal.com]

:chuckle: We had to code concordance programs for a programming class. I think one of the features someone did logged how many times the word "kill" was used in the Bible.

[poukledden.livejournal.com]

hmmmm...maybe amazon could next have a program that randomly generates user reviews. they'd probably make about as much sense as many of the real ones do...and for fun they could have the random Author Rant in the style of Anne Rice...

[marykaykare.livejournal.com]

It may or may not comfort you to know I had no trouble whatsoever figuring out what was happening in The Fall of the Kings. Of course, I do have a Master's Degree. In Science! (Okay, library and information science but still.)

And I liked it a lot too.

MKK

[snakey.livejournal.com]

I don't see what the reviewers' difficulty was in figuring out what was going on. (It ate two days of my life and I couldn't put it down.) Especially the reviewer who was all, "But it wasn't explicit enough!!" I mean, wtf? Go and read some porn already..... And the ones that were all, "I wanted a happier ending!!" Oh, just fuck off, will you? ::huggles my copy::

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

Friend, I like the cut of your jib!

[handworn.livejournal.com]

Ah, the marvels of Optical Character Recognition. I'm not surprised that no one has any stories of how incredibly useful this kind of thing is. It's like navel contemplation for Amazon.

Oddly, it reminds me of the story, reportedly true, of the guy who long before computers counted every "i" in Robinson Crusoe.

Many of the online reviews imply that even people with college degrees couldn't actually figure out what's going on in it

College has become almost a manufacturing job. "People with college degrees" is moving closer to "people with automobiles" in terms of how unusual or difficult it is to be. The Phantom Professor (http://phantomprof.blogspot.com/) has a pretty awful (but well-written) cross-section of the problem on her blog, titled "A Murder of Crows."

[saralinda.livejournal.com]

Concordances! And Really Great Discounts!!!! (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0147502683/ref%3Damb%5Film%5F228133/104-4114496-9561503)