First of all, Happy New Year to everyone.
Amazon.com have added a facility to their site where you can look up sample
pages from a book, and in some cases they offer text stats such as fog index
and wordcount. So, for anyone who is interested, here are the wordcounts for
JCO's novels and novellas (including pseudonymous and YA titles), where they
are available. They aren't available for all titles - most of the earlier
out of print ones are missing, and it looks like info for the 2006 titles
are not yet available. So here they are, and I've made some comments after
the list:
A Garden of Earthly Delights - 152,748 words
them - 194,067
Bellefleur - 249,422
You Must Remember This - 170,770
Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart - 116.694
Black Water - 26,240
Foxfire - 93,893
What I Lived For - 234,005
Zombie - 33,967
We Were the Mulvaneys - 164,862
Man Crazy - 62,248
My Heart Laid Bare - 190,690
Broke Heart Blues - 165,332
Blonde - 300,683
The Barrens - 92,134
Middle Age: A Romance - 178,635
Beasts - 28,822
I'll Take You There - 87,447
Big Mouth and Ugly Girl - 55,954
The Tattooed Girl - 83,731
Rape: A Love Story - 31,768
Freaky Green Eyes - 49,246
Take Me, Take Me With You - 55,060
The Falls - 155,258
The Stolen Heart - 60,632
Missing Mom - 134,524
Sexy - 34,439
One surprise is how short Zombie is - admittedly the text contains
illustrations but they don't take up all that much space as I remember. Like
Black Water, this is usually referred to as a novel, but should it really be
called a novella?
Blonde is confirmed as JCO's longest novel. I don't have a wordcount, but
looking at my copy I would suggest that A Bloodsmoor Romance is #2, followed
by Bellefleur and What I Lived For, though bear in mind there are some
novels which I've never seen copies of let alone read (The Assassins and Do
With Me What You Will being two of them).
While JCO has become more prolific with each decade in terms of *numbers* of
titles - 16 published from 2001 to date, they are probably shorter on
average, with only three of them exceeding 100,000 words. The years
1991-2000 produced 15 individual titles, though they are on average rather
longer, with five over 150,000 words (and two of those are 230,00 words
plus). By comparison, twelve titles were published in 1981-1990, nine in
1971-1980 and four in the 1960s.
Finally, the total number of novels/novellas to date = 56. Has anyone read
all of them? I've read 32, though I'm sure there are many on this mailing
list who can beat that!
Gary
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