We’re told not to judge a book by its cover, but what about its length, or how long its sentences are? Turns out, that’s also probably not a good idea. I pulled word data for 20 well-known books. No comment on whether these are all good books - they’re just widely recognized!

The data, which are from Amazon, include the number of words and sentences. Amazon provides average sentence length, but they round it, so I recalculated the values. They also provide a value for “complex words,” which they define as the percentage of words in the book that are at least three syllables. I have included those values here, which are rounded to the nearest percent.

Data source: http://www.amazon.com/