Ah, December. The time of year where everyone starts romanticizing winter weather and dreaming of idyllic snow covered landscapes.
Let’s put a stop to that by reading some Jack London, an author famous for his adventure stories about people heading for the frozen north during the Yukon gold rush and then having an absolutely awful time full of hypothermia, starvation and wolves.
His adventure stories are also notable for their unusual protagonists, such as Call of the Wild which centers around a sled dog named Buck and the various triumphs and tragedies he experiences as he passes from one owner to another.
Not that Buck started out as a sled dog. He was actually a farm dog that wound up being abducted by a criminal who was desperate for cash and well aware that the gold rush had made large dogs of any breed worth a small fortune to northern adventurers. Of course, the life of an underfed sled dog is a lot tougher than that of domestic farm dog which should help explain why the story is “Call of the Wild” and not “Buck the Dog’s Canadian Fun Time Vacation”.
And now for some basic statistics:
Word Count: 32349
Average Word Size: 4.28 letters
Median Word Size: 4 letters
Longest Word: misunderstandings (17 letters)
Sentence Count: 1700
Average Sentence Length: 19.03
Median Sentence Length: 17
Longest Sentence: 64 words long
With the aurora borealis flaming coldly overhead, or the stars leaping in the frost dance, and the land numb and frozen under its pall of snow, this song of the huskies might have been the defiance of life, only it was pitched in minor key, with long-drawn wailings and half-sobs, and was more the pleading of life, the articulate travail of existence.
It’s mildly interesting to note that Call of the Wild has both a shorter word length average and a shorter sentence length average than Frankenstein. Which honestly makes sense considering it is meant to be a dramatic wilderness adventure rather than a moody tale of melodramatic doom and gloom.
Not that wilderness adventures can’t pull of melodrama. This song… was the… articulate travail of existence…
