The Way the World Works

Starred review from May 28, 2012
Whether it’s his two-page reflection on why he likes the telephone, or his heady tome on why he is a pacifist, novelist and essayist Baker (Double Fold, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award) is a delight to read. In this diverse collection of essays, spanning 15 years, Baker offers gorgeous prose and poses important questions about our era of digital readership. As he notes in his essay on the Kindle 2, there is a distinction between a writer’s work and its presentation in book form. Many essays staunchly defend the reading of print books and newspapers, including “Narrow Ruled,” in which he shares how he reads closely—“when I come across something I really like in a book, I put a little dot in the margin.” A proud defender of libraries and newspapers, Baker acknowledges the perception of him as “a weirdo cultist, a ringleader” for books. While his musings on video games and the neighborhood trash dump are memorable, the collection’s real value lies in its essays on reading. Baker practices what he preaches by collecting his own work, so that somewhere, people will be turning paper pages. Though it would have been wonderful if the collection included a new, unpublished essay, readers of this book will still find themselves agreeing with him: books are still worth getting. Agent: Melanie Jackson.

July 1, 2012
Baker is a writer of unbridled imagination, rampant curiosity, and zealous advocacy. These traits inspire his frequently controversial novels (e.g., House of Holes, 2011) and his freshly conceived and avidly observed essays. As the title of his new collection suggests, Baker wants to know how things are done, but he is also investigating why we do what we do and who we are or wish we were. In original, keen, and entertaining essays either pithy or delving from the last 15 years, Baker remembers rotary phones and the time-and-temperature number and describes a job sweeping up coins in a fountain. He shares his fascination with the wing language on airplanes; profiles Daniel Defoe and David Remnick; chronicles his immersions in video games, Wikipedia, and e-books; and argues cogently and ardently in defense of library collections and pacifism. Each essay is a lamp; gathered together, they are solar in their radiance. Baker's reasoning is sophisticated, his analogies dazzling, his passion for clarity invigorating, his prose sterling, and his mission to preserve the past and illuminate both facts and feelings is profound.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)

June 15, 2012
The erudite novelist and essayist ponders obsessions both old (newspapers and rare books) and new (Kindle 2, Wikipedia, video games). Very little escapes the attention of Baker (House of Holes, 2012, etc.), whether it's the small details of old jobs, fleeting summers, technology--both dying and cutting edge--or odd but fascinating obscurities. He likes to find the form in abstractions. In "I Said to Myself," he digs away at questions many fiction writers have considered at one time or another: What does a person really sound like when he talks to himself? Are thoughts sentences? Should they be placed between quotes, or was James Joyce right to get rid of those? Baker also wants to preserve the past even as he warily embraces the future. In an essay about gondoliers, he refers to the gondola as "an ancient and noble boat, which summed up many lost beautiful things." Baker is a champion of beauty on the verge of vanishing, whether it involves old newspapers or rare books tossed out by space-squeezed libraries, or Wikipedia entries on forgotten Beat poets. He's against destruction on principle, as he shows in a defense of pacifism, in which he argues that wars only create retribution and violence. An "armistice without victory" would have saved more Jews in World War II, he believes, a deeply felt if unconvincing hindsight proposition. He prefers war as a video game--and who doesn't?--such as Modern Warfare 2, which turns out to be "an unjingoistic, perhaps completely cynical amusement." Not a major work, but a thoughtful collection from a writer who, to quote his own description of Daniel Defoe, has "an enormous appetite for truth and life and bloody specificity."

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March 15, 2012

Baker offers a second essay collection that should prove just as thought-provoking, whimsical, and physically detailed as his edgy novels. These essays, which have appeared in publications like The New Yorker, range from political controversy and video games to the invention of the gondola. Smart entertainment.

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

July 1, 2012

Baker is known for his expostulation against the demise of the card catalog, his repatriation of thousands of American newspapers deaccessioned by the British Library (Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper), and for the priapic prose of his porn-for-thinkers novels, e.g., House of Holes. This second collection of his essays, after The Size of Thoughts (1996), is a tapestry of Baker's personal, emotional, and intellectual life. He recalls incidents of childhood and adolescence, and his first encounter with the woman he eventually married in Venice. His watery jaunt to the church later informs an essay on the history and craftsmanship of the gondola. Baker interviews David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, confesses to Wikipedia addiction, matches wits with rogue editors, purchases a Kindle 2, affirms his passion for libraries and newspapers, and expounds his commitment to pacifism. VERDICT Baker's voice is that of a convivially erudite conversationalist seeking comfort in the predictable in a high-tech, ever-changing world. Anyone who delights in reading will be heartened.--Lonnie Weatherby, McGill Univ. Lib., Montreal, Canada

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.