Amazon.com Review
Novelist and essayist Nicholson Baker has had a small but well-deserved cult following since his first book,
The Mezzanine, and the publication of the literary sex-bomb
Vox saw his popularity mushroom. Baker's great gift is a precision of observational detail that has a peculiarly incisive effect on a reader's consciousness. Here is over a decade's worth of his essays and articles, including the much-praised card catalogue article first published in the
New Yorker.
The Size of Thoughts, through its varied forays into the realms of the overlooked, the underfunded, and the wrongfully scrapped, is a funny and thought-provoking book by one of the most distinctive stylists and thinkers of our time.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
Novelist and essayist Baker (The Fermata) here collects his published essays of the past 14 years, which showcase his talent for generating social and literary punditry that is at once whimsical and profound. His musings on the merits of such mundane items as nail clippers and library card catalogues reveal subtlety of thought and a dazzling mastery of language. If a few of the earlier pieces are arcane, Baker's penchant for probing the metaphysical depths of the ostensibly quotidian generally yields lively and provocative insights about the significance of often-unnoticed threads in the fabric of modern life. "Lumber," the longest essay in the collection, is a charmingly vertiginous meditation on the literary history of the word lumber, a project that leads Baker through a convoluted but interesting textual maze in which he discovers the pleasures of forgotten literary works and finds a new perspective on the opuses of several major writers. Those who enjoy Baker's distinctive brand of intellectual mind games will find him in top form here. Author tour.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Library Journal
All but one of the essays in novelist Baker's (Fermata, LJ 1/94) collection have previously appeared in publications like the Atlantic Monthly, the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, and Esquire between 1982 and 1995. Their subjects range from changing one's mind and model airplanes to punctuation and the books that appear in the pictures of mail-order catalogs. All the essays are witty, intelligent, thought-provoking, and a joy to read. A previously unpublished essay, "Lumber," which comprises 40 percent of the book, discusses the meaning of the word lumber and traces its use in English literature. It is an example of literary scholarship at its best: painstakingly thorough and fun to read. Many librarians will not like "Discards," in which Baker questions the wisdom of destroying library cards and describes the frustration of subject searches in computer catalogs, but all librarians should read it. Highly recommended.?Judy Mimken, Boise P.L., Id.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Scientific American
Baker possesses a sublime prose style, as well as unbridled enthusiasm for his topics . . . .
The Size of Thoughtsis replete with charm and wit and literary bravura.
From Booklist
In writing the essay "Rarity," Baker probably did not realize he had himself created something rare, contributing to the ever-changing, quickly embraced attitudes and adoptions of modern life. More than a delightful sampling by a trendy, acclaimed, and well-published writer, these essays are the fruits of a bountiful imagination. From nail clippers to model airplanes to the unacknowledged platter-style film projector to the size of thoughts, nothing is off limits and everything is interesting to Baker. His curiosity, keen wit, and search for truth appear refreshingly sincere, and his enthusiasm for the overlooked aspects of our world and daily lives is not merely an obsession with minutia but a zealous, childlike attention to all that can be examined; that quality alone is nearly contagious. Clearly well read, Baker's language and style pay homage to early essayists but remain modern by melding humor and sensitive perception in original ways. Although a few pieces stand out as filler, meant to boost the page count (e.g., "Wedding," "Mlack," "Recipe" ), the overall quality of the pieces is exceptionally high--an outstanding collection!
Janet St. John
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Kirkus Reviews
Showing off Baker's Sears catalog eclecticism and word-playfulness, this collection is congenial kin to his thoughtful, fiddly novels The Mezzanine and Room Temperature rather than the garrulously oversexed Vox. These essays and other ``lumber'' (in its English sense) show off Baker's ideas of scale and subject matter, loosely categorized under rubrics the likes of ``Thought,'' ``Machinery,'' and ``Library Science.'' In Baker's fastidiously discursive approach, the more obscure or minute the subject--such as model airplanes, nail clippers, punctuation marks, slang terminology, or typos--the longer and deeper he goes. His entertaining piece on the movie projector focuses on the transition from reel-to-reel projectors to the modern oversized platter systems, then zooms in on the crucial Maltese cross, the tiny, remarkably precise moving part that drives both. In a lighter study he deciphers and itemizes the books used by upscale furniture companies as props in their mail-order catalogs. An article on the history of punctuation fixes such picayune marks as the ancient cryphia or the medieval pilcrow within the history of Western writing. The collection's two longest pieces reveal the tensions and complements of his antiquarianism and gadget-mania: respectively, cyberspace's on-line library catalogs and the etymology and literary history of the word lumber. In the former, Baker sometimes loses his perspective in the debate over card catalogs versus Boolean-search-driven databases, jumbling nostalgia and practicality. The latter is, at 140 pages, an indulgent tour de force, and also a metaphor for eclectic learning, as he browses through Pope, Johnson, Webster, etc., for lumber's meanings. Although Baker sometimes strains when he directly addresses his concerns and predilections, it takes a rare combination of wit and effort to seem this facile without actually being so. --
Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
Mr. Baker is one of those writers who almost cannot not give pleasure . . . . Like no one I can think of, this writer puts the language through its paces--showing how nomenclature and syntax not only serve heightened perception but also create it in the reader. . . . Mr. Baker's procedure is to settle on something commonplace yet structurally intricate and then, with magnified detailing and sly humor, to unfold hitherto unimagined panoramas. --
The New York Times Book Review, Sven Birkerts
Product Description
The bestselling author of Vox and The Fermata devotes his hyperdriven curiosity and magnificently baroque prose to the fossils of punctuation and the lexicography of smut, delivering to readers a provocative and often hilarious celebration of the neglected aspects of our experience. 368 pp. 15,000 print.
From the Inside Flap
The bestselling author of Vox and The Fermata devotes his hyperdriven curiosity and magnificently baroque prose to the fossils of punctuation and the lexicography of smut, delivering to readers a provocative and often hilarious celebration of the neglected aspects of our experience. 368 pp. 15,000 print.
About the Author
Nicholson Baker has published five novels–
The Mezzanine,
Room Temperature,
Vox,
The Fermata, and
The Everlasting Story of Nory–and two works of nonfiction,
U and I and
The Size of Thoughts. He lives with his wife and two children in Maine.
