Keeper

Friends,

I've sort of fallen for this book blog called The Millions. You probably have heard about it or have been reading it, but it's pretty cool I think.

Anyway, while reading my way through that blog, I found an article about this guy who has his own blog about reading his way through the Best American Short Stories from 1978 to 2009. I like that, too...though he is reading them at a slower pace than I would like.

Either the writer of the BASS blog or one of the fine folks at The Millions created a google document that shows the title, author and gender of each story that has appeared in the pages of the BASS since 1978. It does not include the Roll of Honor in the back, just the ones that have been republished.

From that google document, I made the below Wordle using the titles of the stories that appeared. The most frequent word for a title (not including articles and such)? Life. It has appeared 9 times. The words in the absolute smallest type on the Wordle have only appeared once, so the range is from 9 to 1. How the Wordle program chose the single-serving words they did for this mapping, I don't know. I find it is interesting "Elvis" has appeared in the title of a BASS just as often as the word "Woman."

Click the small one to be taken to the Wordle site for the largest, clearest view. Go to the bottom to see it slightly blown up for your convenience.

viva BASS