Wednesday, May 23, 2012

the size of thoughts - nicholson baker

mr baker is delightful. he writes about the most mundane subjects (fingernail clippings! punctuation!) and, with a few deft descriptions, makes you look at them from an utterly unexpected and yet totally familiar angle, and you think, why didn't i think of this first? his humor is sneaky and dry and catches you when you are looking the other way. his metaphors are funky apt. his problem is his propensity for extremely extended sentences which demand of the reader mental assiduousness of contortionist proportions and to which this sentence does not even begin to approximate. what i say is, only st. paul is allowed to write a sentence that becomes a paragraph.

it's a sparkly little book. the question is, can i finish it? or will long distance fatigue set in first?

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