Monday, April 23, 2018

Ten Past Reads with Common Title Words


I'm linking up with That Artsy Reader Girl for another Top Ten Tuesday.

This week's topic is "Frequently Used Words In [Insert Genre/Age Group] Title." Being a data-minded person, I figured someone else had probably already done the work to figure out which words are most commonly used in book titles, and I didn't want to reinvent the wheel. It turns out that the most common words in titles on WorldCat are pretty boring, so instead I found this analysis of the most common title words by genre. Here are ten genres for which I had read a book whose title had the most common word for that genre.*


1. Bio & Memoirs: "Life" — Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs


2. Children's: "Day" — Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day by Juliet Viorst


3. Fantasy: "Dragon" — How to Train Your Dragon by Cressida Cowell


4. History: "History" — Marriage, a History by Stephanie Coontz


5. Literary Fiction: "Sea" — Island Beneath the Sea by Isabel Allende


6. Middle Grade: "Mystery" — The Mystery of the Stolen Diamonds by David A. Adler


7. Mystery: "Death" — Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie


8. Nonfiction: "War" — Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand


9. Religious & Inspirational: "God" — The God We Never Knew by Marcus J. Borg


10. True Crime: "Murder" — The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America by Erik Larson

*This is based on my best guess of which word in each Wordle is largest; in some cases, it seemed like more than one word was the largest size, in which case I just used the word for which I had an example.

I also used Wordle to analyze the titles (excluding subtitles) of all the books I've read to date, and these are the ten most common words: Life, Love, Girl, Little, Guide, Book, World, God, Secret, and Black!

What books have you read for these categories/words?

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Looking back:
One year ago I was reading: The Intuitionist and Howl's Moving Castle
Five years ago I was reading: Moby-Dick, Quiet, and American Voices of World War I
Ten years ago I was reading: The Devil Wears Prada

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