The size of thoughts : essays and other lumber

by Nicholson Baker

Paper Book, 1996

Status

Available

Call number

814/.54

Genres

All Topics

Nonfiction

Publication

New York : Random House, c1996.

Description

Novelist Nicholson Baker, author of The Mezzanine and Vox and called by Vanity Fair "the best American writer of his generation," here collects over a decade's worth of essays and journalism, including his controversial and highly praised 1994 article on the destruction of library card catalogs. His subjects range from the internals of the movie projector to the emotional tribulations of reading aloud; from the disappearance of hybrid punctuation to the mechanics of changing one's mind; from the lexicography of dirty talk to the manufacture of the fingernail clipper. There is a wedding address, a study of the not-so-random books that are used as props in mail-order catalogs, and a recipe. The final essay, which appears in print here for the first time, pursues through several centuries of prose and poetry the vagaries of the word lumber as a metaphor for the contents of the human mind, in what becomes in the telling a dazzlingly pedantic case study of the fanaticism of scholarship and the beauty that can reside within a piece of ordinary language.… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member santhony

I've read and enjoyed other works by Baker (The Fermata, Vox), but this collection of magazine articles is absolute rubbish. Random musings on arcane topics such as fingernail clippers, cinema projectors and model airplanes not only fail to entertain, they appear to have no redeeming value

whatsoever.

Baker is without question a talented writer, but this collection aptly demonstrates that even the best author needs adequate subject matter with which to work. I'm stunned at just how bad this collection actually is. The first time I've ever awarded a one star rating.

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LibraryThing member iayork

Lumber!: This is a brilliant book. It consists of several short essays on varied subjects; fingernail clippers, a review of a slang dictionary, and the demise of card catalogues to name a few, and one long essay on the history and usage of the word 'lumber'.

Nicholson is a master of finding the

sublime in the mundane and his essays bring into focus the understated beauty of everyday objects. Eccentric and and at times almost comically over-erudite? Sure, but you'll find yourself nodding in silent recognition at his apt descriptions of the minutiae of daily life.

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LibraryThing member moibibliomaniac

Some very good pieces, and some that are merely fodder. The best is "Discards": what happened to the provenance history and other data on library cataloge cards when university libraries switched to online database systems in the 1990s - a must read for the lover of books formerly owned by famous

people. "The History of Punctuation" comes in second for being informative, followed by "Books as Furniture" for being witty. "Lumber," which the author calls "the printed products from the lumber-room" – the mind, I found to be an interesting read, all seven pieces of it, and on a variety of subject matter. But I wasn't impressed with the remainder of the book, about the size of the author's thoughts, much less the other topics he was writing about

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LibraryThing member MSarki

I looked at every essay, read a couple, but really found nothing to want me to delve any deeper into the fellow. This guy is just not interesting to me. I do not like his personality at all, which is, for the most part, missing from the beginning of this book and quick to get a little too full of

itself to the degree I was finding myself becoming nauseated beyond repair. I have since read a couple Raymond Carver short stories in order to get back to something real, something with gusto and flair.

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LibraryThing member jen.e.moore

Picked up on the recommendation of BoingBoing, read a few essays, decided I wasn't a huge fan. He can get a little nasty about other people, which is an automatic turn-off for me.

LibraryThing member nmele

Nicholson Baker is one of the most interesting writers alive. This collection of essays is both serious and very funny. At times, I was chuckling out loud, at other times astonished by his attention to detail and his perspective on those details he cherishes. The extended piece "Lumber" had my

amazed and amused throughout.

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