Nicholson Baker, _The Way the World Works_

HERE IT IS, ten years to the day since the very first Loads of Learned Lumber post. I haven't even changed the layout once in all that time--so I hope it has gone from embarrassingly outdated on through mortifyingly obsolete and back around to nostalgically quaint. At least I've been faithful: 595 posts in ten years, better than one a week.

The blog's title, you may recognize, is a phrase from Pope's Dunciad, a phrase that was moreover the chief subject of "Lumber," the brilliant final essay in Nicholson Baker's first essay collection, The Size of Thoughts. That first post, back on May 21, 2008 was on Baker's Human Smoke, so this seemed a good opportunity to plunk down and read this, his second essay collection, which has been waiting on my shelves for a few years.

As any Baker admirer (I am one) would expect, it has its share of quirky subjects ("No Step" is about the written instructions found on airplanes) and idiosyncratic phrasing (one video game is praised for Its "realistic eye blinks and moments of ecstatic mundanity," another for "the cool, insect-chirping enormity of the scrublands"; a speaker at a rally has "a thick asymmetry of graying hair"). But when Baker needs to get serious, as in responding to the critics of Human Smoke, he can ("Why I Am a Pacifist").

Favorite themes recur: memory (the Brainardian "One Summer"), the irreplaceability of card catalogs and newspaper archives, the delights of new ways of learning things (no Luddite, Baker writes appreciatively of Google and Wikipedia). The fascination with erotica reappears in "Sex and the City, circa 1840," about "a curiously fleshy moment in the history of New York publishing." Crucially, Baker's ability to evoke a powerful though ephemeral sense of fulfillment, which is what hooked me way back in the days of The Mezzanine and Room Temperature, is still strong in the last essay, "Mowing."

I may not live to see it, but I hope Baker gets a Library of America volume eventually. He may be a miniaturist, but so was Max Beerbohm, and who would deny Max his laurel crown? Besides, anyone who got Leon Wieseltier as steamed as Baker did has earned a spot in the history of American letters.