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beepbeepbooks's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
emotional
inspiring
lighthearted
reflective
relaxing
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
Nicholson Baker could describe surgery as symphony. Each book is a beautiful reverie of a certain place and time, and the encounters that change people. So so good.
kevinsmokler's review against another edition
4.0
You gotta love Nicholson Baker's thing -- hyper-localized, funny flirty takes on the mundanities of life like air nozzles and toilet paper, but this study of a new father feeding his new baby a bottle is about as warm and charming as it sounds if you can imagine drilling that deep into it. If you can, you're in the hand s of both the master and inventor of the game.
phthadani's review against another edition
3.0
I truly adore Baker’s stream of consciousness writing style and how he connect the character’s past memories and present actions together in this book. Quite an interesting book.
ampersunder's review against another edition
5.0
Super amazing. Very similar in style to The Mezzanine, but centred around love and childhood memories and composing music and the sound of writing and commas -- compassionate and full of wonder for what love can be compared to the more technical, everydayness of The Mezzanine (or am I misremembering it?). Baker circles between past and present across themes and connects memories and thoughts and moments in beautiful ways.
The book describes itself in the following passage from chapter 5:
"The artificial frog permanently influenced my theory of knowledge: I certainly believed, rocking my daughter on this Wednesday afternoon, that with a little concentration one's whole life could be reconstructed from any single twenty-minute period randomly or almost randomly selected; that is, that there was enough content in that single confined sequence of thoughts and events and the setting that gave rise to them to make connections that would proliferate backward until potentially every item of autobiographical interest -- every pet theory, minor observation, significant moment of shame or happiness -- could be at least glancingly covered; but you had to expect that a version of your past arrived at this way would exhibit, like the unhealthily pale frog, certain telltale differences of emphasis from the past you would recount if you proceeded serially, beginning with 'I was born on January 5, 1957,' and letting each moment give birth naturally to the next. The particular cell you started from colored your entire re-creation."
The book describes itself in the following passage from chapter 5:
"The artificial frog permanently influenced my theory of knowledge: I certainly believed, rocking my daughter on this Wednesday afternoon, that with a little concentration one's whole life could be reconstructed from any single twenty-minute period randomly or almost randomly selected; that is, that there was enough content in that single confined sequence of thoughts and events and the setting that gave rise to them to make connections that would proliferate backward until potentially every item of autobiographical interest -- every pet theory, minor observation, significant moment of shame or happiness -- could be at least glancingly covered; but you had to expect that a version of your past arrived at this way would exhibit, like the unhealthily pale frog, certain telltale differences of emphasis from the past you would recount if you proceeded serially, beginning with 'I was born on January 5, 1957,' and letting each moment give birth naturally to the next. The particular cell you started from colored your entire re-creation."
gglazer's review against another edition
1.0
This little slip of a book spans only 20 minutes, during which Baker is rocking his infant daughter to sleep. It's really pretentious and really self-aggrandizing. And pedantic. And yucky. And did I mention pretentious.
I was hoping for a meditation on fatherhood from a male perspective, and I suppose I got that. This book certainly couldn't have been written by a woman; the time Baker spends writing about his wife's body vs. the time he spends writing about the actual baby we're supposed to believe is in his arms... yup, definitely not written by a mother. Blech.
I was hoping for a meditation on fatherhood from a male perspective, and I suppose I got that. This book certainly couldn't have been written by a woman; the time Baker spends writing about his wife's body vs. the time he spends writing about the actual baby we're supposed to believe is in his arms... yup, definitely not written by a mother. Blech.
bengriffin's review against another edition
3.0
A self-indulgent little novel which would probably appeal more to parents or the pretentious intelligentia than it did to me. Having said that he does have quite the knack for tapping into certain evocative memories, such as the taste of sun-warmed water pistol water, and it can be quite nice to escape into someone elses musings for an afternoon, even if they are somewhat idyllic, personal, and self-important.
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