The Vital Stats of Travel Books

Travel Blog • Michael Yessis • 09.02.05 | 12:59 AM ET

Did you know that each sentence in Bruce Chatwin’s travel classic “In Patagonia” contains an average of 15.1 words? Did you know that you need almost 10 years of formal education to truly understand a passage from Francis Mayes’ “Under the Tuscan Sun”? Did you know that 12 percent of the words in Bill Bryson’s “In a Sunburned Country” are complex? I didn’t know—didn’t even care to know—until I read Linton Weeks’s story in Tuesday’s Washington Post about Amazon.com’s text stats feature. Weeks uses the stats to compare some literary classics—“‘Ulysses’ by James Joyce (9 on the Fog Index) is more complicated than William Faulkner’s ‘The Sound and the Fury’ (5.7 on the Fog Index),” and so on.

Now, of course, nobody should take this too seriously. As Weeks writes of the text stats feature, “It slices! It dices! It can uncomplicate comedies, trivialize tragedies, diminish legitimate discourse and completely humiliate the humanities!” Yet, it’s also a highly addictive time waster. I just spent some time surfing the stats for a handful of travel books. How do some of the best-known travel writers and their books rate? I selected Nielsen’s current best-selling travel book, Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman’s Long Way Round, and nine other beloved travel books. In no particular order, they are:

Video Night in Kathmandu by Pico Iyer
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain
The Great Railway Bazaar by Paul Theroux
Under the Tuscan Sun by Frances Mayes
Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere by Jan Morris
Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen
Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon
In a Sunburned Country by Bill Bryson

According to the Flesch Index, a 0-100 scale with the lower ranking signifying a harder read, Morris’s “Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere” is a runaway winner as the most difficult of the books, rating a 43.2. Iyer’s “Video Night in Kathmandu” is the runner up with a score of 52.6. For perspective, Thomas Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow” scored 60.1 and James Joyce’s “Ulysses” scored 68.1. That’s right. Ulysses ranks an easier read than “Under the Tuscan Sun.” Rounding out the rankings:

54.3 In a Sunburned Country
56.1 Innocents Abroad
63.5 Out of Africa
63.7 In Patagonia
63.9 The Great Railway Bazaar
64.9 Under the Tuscan Sun
65.3 Long Way Round
67.5 Blue Highways

In the Complex Words category, defined as words containing three or more syllables, “Trieste” and “Video Night” also run 1-2 . The books have 15% and 13% complex words respectively. The rest of the bunch:

12% In a Sunburned Country
10% In Patagonia
10% The Great Railway Bazaar
10% Innocents Abroad
10% Under the Tuscan Sun
9% Blue Highways
8% Long Way Round
8% Out of Africa

The Words per Sentence honor goes to Dinesen’s “Out of Africa,” which averages a whopping 25.3. “Trieste” and Twain’s “Innocents Abroad” run close behind with 24.6 and 23.3 words per sentence respectively. The others stack up as follows:

19.1 Video Night in Kathmandu
18.8 In a Sunburned Country
18.6 Long Way Round
16.4 The Great Railway Bazaar
15.2 Under the Tuscan Sun
15.1 In Patagonia
13.0 Blue Highways

The top honor in the Fog Index—it refers to the number of years of formal education required to read and understand a passage of the text—goes to “Trieste” with 15.9. “Innocents Abroad” (13.5) and “Out of Africa” (13.2) round out the top three. The read requiring the least education? Least Heat-Moon’s “Blue Highways” at 8.8. The others rate like so:

12.7 Video Night in Kathmandu
12.5 In a Sunburned Country
10.6 Long Way Round
10.4 The Great Railway Bazaar
10.2 In Patagonia
9.9 Under the Tuscan Sun

See, it’s a lot of empty calories, but also strangely interesting. How do your favorites stack up?

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