A Suitable Blog

At a little over 590 thousand words and spanning 1,349 pages, Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy is almost-certainly among the top ten longest single-volume English-language novels. It’s pretty fucking huge.

A Suitable Boy, seen from the edge
I’ll stick with the Kindle edition: I fear that merely holding the paperback would be exhausting.

I only discovered A Suitable Boy this week (and haven’t read it – although there are some good reviews that give me an inclination to) when, on a whim, I decided to try to get a scale of how much I’d ever written on this blog and then decided I needed something tangible to use as a comparison. Because – give or take – that’s how much I’ve written here, too:

Graph showing cumulative words written on this blog, peaking at 593,457.
At 593,457 words, this blog wouldn’t fit into that book unless we printed it on the covers as well.

Of course, there’s some caveats that might make you feel that the total count should be lower:

  • It might include a few pieces of non-content code, here and there. I tried to strip them out for the calculation, but I wasn’t entirely successful.
  • It included some things which might be considered metadata, like image alt-text (on the other hand, sometimes I like to hide fun messages in my image alt-text, so perhaps they should be considered content).

On the other hand, there are a few reasons that it perhaps ought to be higher:

  • It doesn’t include any of the content “lost” during the July 2004 server failure, some of which (like this post about Orange) were later recovered but many of which (like this post about Christmas plans and upcoming exams) remain damaged. It also doesn’t include any of the lost content from the original 1998/1999 version of this blog, only the weird angsty-teen out-of-context surviving bits.
  • Post titles (which sometimes contain part of the content) and pages outside of blog posts are not included in the word count.
  • I’ve removed all pictures for the purpose of the word count. Tempting though it was to make each worth a thousand words, that’d amount to about another one and a half million words, which seemed a little excessive.
A delicious-looking BLT. Mmm, bacon.
Another reason for not counting images was that it was harder than you’d think to detect repeat use of images that I’ve used too many times. Like this one.

Of course, my blog doesn’t really have a plot like A Suitable Boy (might compare well to the even wordier Atlas Shrugged, though…): it’s a mixture of mostly autobiographical wittering interspersed with musings on technology and geekery and board games and magic and VR and stuff. I’m pretty sure that if I knew where my life would be now, 18 years ago (which is approximately when I first started blogging), I’d have, y’know, tried to tie it all together with an overarching theme and some character development or something.

Or perhaps throw in the odd plot twist or surprise: something with some drama to keep the reader occupied, rather than just using the web as a stream-of-conciousness diary of whatever it is I’m thinking about that week. I could mention, for example, that there’ll be another addition to our house later this year. You heard it here first (unless you already heard it from somewhere else first, in which case you heard it there first.)

Annabel sitting on her daddy's knee and looking at sonograph pictures of her future baby brother.
Brought up in a world of tiny, bright, UHD colour touchscreens, Annabel seemed slightly underwhelmed by the magic of a sonograph picture of her future baby brother.

Still: by the end of this post I’ll have hit a nice, easy-to-remember 594,000 words.

Graph showing cumulative words written on this blog, peaking at 593,457.× A delicious-looking BLT. Mmm, bacon.× Annabel sitting on her daddy's knee and looking at sonograph pictures of her future baby brother.×

5 comments

  1. Strokey Strokey says:

    Congratulations.
    594,000 words is quite an achievement

  2. Nice looking sandwich !

    ;-)

    1. Dan Q Dan Q says:

      Yeah, I’ve used it in seven blog posts now, mostly ones about my attempts at vegetarianism.

  3. Eric P Johnson Eric P Johnson says:

    I have a paperback Harper Perennial version and there are pages missing (not torn-out, but as if the. printer missed them). Has anyone else ever experienced this? It’s pages 1171 to 1202. The way it looks (it was an almost new paperback when I started it) the pages clearly aren’t removed, but not printed… anyway, I was shocked to get so far into such a long booked and see the gap in the page count and the plot… I ordered one from the library and am hoping that one has the missing pages…

  4. Dan Q Dan Q says:

    Number of Posts, by Kind, per Month I’ve been blogging since 1998 (although few posts survive from the early years), initially on the Avatar Diary (hosted on Castle of the Four Winds and then AvAngel.com), later on Scatmania.org, then finally on DanQ.me. This graph shows the number of posts for

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