Word Counts

Amazing what a pain it is to find out the word counts of books. It's useful for a writer to get some sort of perspective on what's what. For the last year I've been counting the word counts of books I've read so I figured I'd post them in case somebody else looking for some of that perspective might stumble upon them. My technique is one I learned in high school typing class (actually it was called Keyboarding Skills and it was hovering on extinction which gives you a good idea of my age): count each letter and blank space, each group of five is a word. I take one line's average then count the lines per page, then how many pages in the book. Through several corroborations with other published word counts and by using the Word document's Word Count feature of public domain texts I've found this technique to be pretty accurate. For example, I counted the first chapter of The Good Soldier and came up with 2800. Putting that in a document and using its feature it came up with 2808. Listed are just the titles. (It also gives a good idea of what I like to read.)

76,371 The Good Soldier
78,540 Book of Evidence
110,058 Shroud
133,200 Lolita
148,824 White Noise
187,220 Zen and the art of Motorcycle Maintenance

206,640 The Information
149,760 All the Pretty Horses

201,240 The Crossing
134,784 Cities of the Plain
441, 264 Underworld
54, 040 Amsterdam
183,750 American Pastoral
32,760 The Body Artist
204,750 Samaritan

207,025 Lush Life
87,000 A Day and a Night and a Day

172,125 The Bloodstone Papers
59,760 Diary of a Bad Year