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The Way the World Works: Essays, by Nicholson Baker
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New York Times bestselling author Nicholson Baker has assembled a “provocative and entertaining” (The Wall Street Journal) collection of his most original and brilliant pieces from the last fifteen years.
From political controversy to the intimacy of his own life, from forgotten heroes of pacifism to airplane wings, telephones, paper mills, David Remnick, Joseph Pulitzer, the OED, and the manufacture of the Venetian gondola, Nicholson Baker ranges over the map of life to examine what troubles us, what eases our pain, and what brings us joy. The Way the World Works is a keen-minded, generous-spirited compendium by a modern American master.
- Sales Rank: #735795 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Simon Schuster
- Published on: 2013-08-20
- Released on: 2013-08-20
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.37" h x .90" w x 5.50" l, .63 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 336 pages
Features
- Used Book in Good Condition
Review
“Baker is one of the most beautiful, original and ingenious prose stylists to have come along in decades . . . and takes a kind of mad scientist's delight in the way things work and how the world is put together.” (Charles McGrath The New York Times Magazine)
“[A] winning new book. . . . This singular writer . . . can mount an argument skillfully and deliver an efficient conclusive kick.” (The San Francisco Chronicle)
“Nicholson Baker is such a swell, smart writer that he rarely - maybe never - tips his hand.... In Baker's view the mundane, closely enough observed, may be the skate key to the sublime.” (Carolyn See The Washington Post)
“A fundamentally radical author . . . you can never be sure quite where Baker is going to take you. . . . [He] is an essayist in the tradition of GK Chesterton and Max Beerbohm, writing winning fantasies upon whatever chance thoughts may come into his head.” (Financial Times (London))
“What these works share is a sense that how we think, our idiosyncratic dance with both experience and memory, defines who we are.” (The Los Angeles Times)
“His prose is so luminescent and so precise it manually recalibrates our brains.” (Lev Grossman Time)
“Baker looks at the world around us in a way that is not only artful and entertaining but instructive.” (Charleston Post & Courier)
“Mr. Baker is a wise and amiable cultural commentator worth listening to. . . . [his] prose is polished, witty . . . his essays are always provocative and entertaining.” (Cynthis Crossen The Wall Street Journal)
“Baker's new essay collection, The Way the World Works, is always absorbing, merging his interest in solid, tangible objects with his devotion to the life of the mind. . . . simply dazzling.” (Seattle Times)
“Exhilarating . . . Eye-opening . . . Baker continues his project of bringing new dimensions and idiosyncrasies to the personal essay, which he is devoted to reviving and reinventing.” (The Boston Globe)
“If only more of the literary world worked the way Baker does. . . . You cannot deny the courage of the writer. . . . Baker is singular.” (The Buffalo News)
About the Author
Nicholson Baker is the author of nine novels and four works of nonfiction, including Double Fold, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award, and House of Holes, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. His work has appeared in�The�New Yorker, Harper’s, and The New York Review of Books.�He lives in Maine with his family.
Excerpt. � Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Way the World Works String
I was two years old when we moved to Rochester, New York. We lived in an apartment on a street that was only a block long, called Strathallan Park.
The shortness of the street was perfect, I thought: it had two ends and not much middle, like a stick that you pick up unconsciously to tap against a fence, or like one of those pieces of string that the people in the food department at Sibley’s, the downtown department store, cut from wall-mounted spools to tie up a box holding a small cake. You could run from our end of the street, near University Avenue, all the way to East Avenue, the grander end, without having to stop to catch your breath, or almost, and when you reached the far corner and turned, panting, with your hands on your knees, you could look down the whole straight sidewalk, past the checkering of driveways and foreshortened snippets of lawn to where you had begun. Everything on my street was knowable by everyone at once.
A few of the lawns along Strathallan Park were, though small, fastidiously groomed—they were bright green and fluffy, and they were edged as well: using a blunt-bladed manual cutter at the end of a push pole, the lawn tenders had dug narrow, almost hidden troughs or gutters in the turf next to stretches of sidewalk and along walkways, outlining their territories as if they were drawing cartoons of them. The edge gutters looked neat, but they could wrench the ankle of a small-footed person who stepped wrong, and they held dangers for tricycle traffic as well: if you were going at top speed, trying to pass another tricyclist on the left, with your knees pumping like the finger-knuckles of a pianist during the final furious trill of his cadenza, you could catch your wheel in a gutter and flip or lose the race.
Some parts of the Strathallan sidewalk were made of pieces of slate that sloped up and down over the questing roots of elm trees (one elm had a mortal wound in its trunk out of which flowed, like blood, black sawdust and hundreds of curled-up larvae), and some parts of the sidewalk were made of aged concrete, with seams cut into them so that they would crack neatly whenever a growing tree required it of them. These seams made me think of the molded line running down the middle of a piece of Bazooka bubble gum, which you could buy in a tiny candy store in the basement of an apartment building near where we lived: the silent man there charged a penny for each piece of gum, machine-wrapped in waxed paper with triangular corner folds. It had a comic on an inner sheet that we read with great interest but never laughed at. Or, for the same penny, you could buy two unwrapped red candies shaped like Roman coins. These were chewy, and they let light through them when you held them up to the sun, but a red Roman coin couldn’t do what a hard pink block of Bazooka gum could as it began to deform itself under the tremendous stamping and squashing force of the first chew: it couldn’t make your eyes twirl juicily in their sockets; it couldn’t make all your saliva fountains gush at once.
When you pulled part of a piece of well-chewed gum out of your mouth, holding the remainder in place, it would lengthen into drooping filaments that were finer and paler than thread. And I was thinking a fair amount about thread and string and twine in those Strathallan years—twine is a beautiful word—about spools of thread, especially after I got the hang of the sewing machine, which I drove as you would a car, listening for and prolonging the electric moan of the foot pedal just before the machine’s silver-knobbed wheel began to turn, and steering the NASCAR scrap of fabric around a demanding closed course of loops and esses. When you floored the Singer’s pedal, the down-darting lever in the side of the machine rose and fell so fast that it became two ghost levers, one at the top of its transit and one at the bottom, and the yanked spool on top responded by hopping and twirling on its spindle, flinging its close-spiraled life away.
Sometimes my mother let me take the spool off the sewing machine and thread the whole living room with it, starting with a small anchor knot on a drawer handle and unreeling it around end tables and doorknobs and lamp bases and rocking-chair arms until everything was interconnected. The only way to get out of the room, after I’d finished its web, was to duck below the thread layer and crawl out.
I was wary of the needle of the sewing machine—my father told me that a sewing machine needle had once gone through my grandmother’s fingernail, next to the bone, and I didn’t like the long shiny hypodermic needles, called “boosters,” at Dr. Ratabaw’s office one block over on Goodman Street. One morning, just after I took a bath, wearing only a T-shirt and underpants, I climbed down into the lightwell of a basement window in the back of our house, and in so doing disturbed some yellow jackets that had built a set of condominiums there, and I got several dozen short-needled booster shots at once, and saw my mother’s arm set upon by outraged wasp abdomens that glinted in the sun as she brushed them off me. I tried to be braver at Dr. Ratabaw’s office after that.
So that was my first street, Strathallan Park. Everything was right nearby, but sometimes we traveled farther afield, to Midtown Plaza, for instance, where I saw a man open a door in the Clock of Nations and climb inside its blue central pillar. There were thick tresses of multicolored wire in the Clock of Nations, each wire controlling a different papier-m�ch� figure, all of whom danced back then, in the days before Midtown Plaza went into a decline and the clock froze. We bought a kite and some string at Parkleigh pharmacy and took them with us to the greensward behind the Memorial Art Gallery, where there were three or four enormous trees and many boomerang-shaped seedpods that rattled like maracas. There wasn’t enough wind there to hold the kite up, so we took it to a park, where it got caught in a tree and tore. My father repaired it on the spot, and even though it was now scarred, heavy with masking tape, we managed to get it aloft again briefly before it was caught by the same tree a second time. That was the beginning of my interest in kite flying.
Then, when I was six, we—that is, my sister, Rachel, my father and mother—moved to a house on Highland Avenue. It had a newel post on the front banister that was perfect for threading the front hall and living room, which I did several times, and it had a porte cochere and six bathrooms, a few of which worked, and it had an old wooden telephone in the hall closet that connected to another telephone in a room in the garage. The phone was dead, as my sister and I verified by shouting inaudible questions into either end, but there were interestingly herringboned threads woven as insulation around its cord, and because the phone had never been much used, the threads weren’t frayed.
Highland Avenue was, as it turned out, also a perfect length of street, just as Strathallan had been, but in the opposite way: it went on forever. In one direction it sloped past Cobbs Hill Drive, where I always turned left when I walked to school, and then past the lawn-and-garden store, where my father bought prehistoric sedums every Sunday; and then it just kept on going. In the other direction it ran past our neighbors’ houses, the Collinses, the Cooks, the Pelusios, and the Eberleins, and past a suburban-looking house on the left, and then it became quite a narrow street without sidewalks that just flowed on and on, who knew where. On Strathallan, our house number had been 30; now it was 1422, meaning that there must have been over a thousand houses on our street. In fact, it wasn’t even called a street; it was an avenue. Avenues were, I gathered, more heavily trafficked, and therefore more important, than streets—Monroe Avenue, East Avenue, Lyell Avenue, Highland Avenue—they reached into surrounding counties and countries, and because the world was round, their ends all joined up on the other side. I was quite pleased to be part of something so infinite.
Soon after we moved in, my grandparents gave us a hammock made of green and white string. We hung it from two hooks on the front porch, and I lay in it looking at the fragment of Highland Avenue that I saw through the stretched fretwork of its strings. I could hear a car coming long before I could see it, and as it passed, its sound swooshed up the driveway toward me like a wave on a beach. That’s when I counted it. One day I counted a thousand cars while lying on that hammock. It took about half an hour or so—a thousand wasn’t as close to infinity as I’d thought it was.
And Cobbs Hill Park, half a block from where we lived, was, I discovered, one of the best kite-flying places in the city. My father was able to put a box kite in the air, which I never could; once it was up it was like a rock, unmoving, nailed to the sky. The key to kite flying, I found, was that you needed to lick your finger a lot and hold it in the air, and you always had to buy more rolls of string than you thought you needed, because the string manufacturers cheated by winding their product in open crisscrossing patterns around an empty cardboard cylinder—it looked as if you were holding a ball of string that was miles long, but in fact it was only eight hundred feet, which was nothing. One way or another, we always ran out of string.
To put myself to sleep at night, I began thinking about kites that never had to come down. I would add more string, half a dozen rolls of it, and when I knew the kite was steady, I would tie my end to a heavy ring in the ground that couldn’t pull away and then I would shinny up the kite line with sticks in my pockets. I’d climb until I was a good ways up, and then I would make a loop around one foot to hold some of my weight, and begin knotting a sort of tree house out of the kite string to which I clung. The kite would be pulled down a little as I worked, but it was so far up in the sky that the loss of height didn’t matter much, and I would use the sticks that I’d brought along as braces or slats around which I would weave the string, emulating our hammock’s texture, until I had made a small, wind-shielding crow’s nest like the basket in a hot-air balloon. I would spend the night up there, and the next morning, as people arrived in the park with their kites, they would point up at me and be impressed.
But that was just how I got to sleep; my biggest real moment of Cobbs Hill kite flying came around 1966, when I was nine. I was given a bat-shaped kite that year. It came from England via Bermuda in a long cardboard box that said “Bat Kite.” The wings were made of black, slightly stretchy vinyl, with four wooden dowels as braces, a fiberglass crosspiece, and a triangle of vinyl with a metal grommet in it, where you tied the string. It was entirely black, a beautiful kite, but I wasn’t able to get it up in the air for more than a few minutes because it was so heavy.
Then one weekend my old tricycle rival, Fred Streuver, and I went up to Cobbs Hill on a day when there was a hard steady wind blowing in from Pittsford Plaza, and the bat kite went up and it stayed up. We were stunned. What had we done right? We began feeding out the string. The kite seemed to want to stay up in the sky. Nothing we could do would bother it. It was hungry for string and it kept pulling, wanting to go out farther, over the path near the tennis courts. I tied on another roll, checking to be sure that I’d made a square knot—the kind that gets stronger and tighter the harder you pull on it. Our black bat was now out past the lilac bushes near Culver Road, and it was high high in the air, visible all over Rochester—hundreds of people could see it—and then we tied on another roll, and it was out beyond Culver Road and still asking for more string.
I had an almost frightened feeling—I was holding directly on to something that was alive and flying and yet far away. Having thought my way out to the empty air where the kite was, I almost forgot how to balance as I stood on the grass of Cobbs Hill. Even the square knots that we had tied had risen out of sight—the string was getting more and more infinite every minute.
Then, as always, we ran out. But we wanted more. We wanted our bat to go a full mile out. Fred held the line as I gathered a length of scrap string that some departed fliers had left behind; I tied it on, even though it had a nested tangle in it that held a twig, and the kite kept pulling. I found another abandoned string, but here Fred and I were overhasty when we tied the knot, we were laughing crazily by now, we were tired, and neither of us was checking each other’s work. We sent up the new string, but when it had gone just out of reach, I saw a tiny unpleasant movement in the knot. It was a writhing sort of furtive wiggle. I said, “No, bring it down!” and I grabbed the line, but the kite’s pull was too strong, and the flawed knot shrugged off the rest of its loops—it had been, I now saw, a granny knot. The string that we held went limp, and the string on the other side of the failed knot went limp as well, and floated sideways.
Way off beyond Culver Road, the kite learned the truth all at once: it flung itself back some feet as if pushed or shot, and its bat wings flapped like loose sails, and then it slid down out of the sky into some trees that were beyond other trees, that were beyond houses, that were beyond trees.
We went looking for it, but it was gone. It had fallen somewhere in a neighborhood of short streets, in one of a hundred little back yards.
(2003)|Way the World Works FOREWORD
Back in 1982, when I was just getting going as a writer, William Whitworth, the editor of The Atlantic, called to say that he was putting together a 125th-anniversary edition and he wondered if I had anything short to contribute to the front of the magazine. Flattered, I wrote something that tootled around in a ruminative way called “Changes of Mind.” Other pieces followed, and I allowed myself to believe that I was helping to bring back the personal essay, which had fallen out of fashion. Some of my heroes were G. K. Chesterton, Christopher Morley, Alice Meynell, William Hazlitt, William James, and Samuel Johnson. By 1996 I had enough for a collection, The Size of Thoughts. Now it’s 2012 and time, it seems, for a second and slightly heftier accrual. The first section of the book, LIFE, is made up of autobiographical bits arranged more or less chronologically; then come some meditations on READING and being read to. After that I tell the story of how I sued a public LIBRARY and talk about the beauties and wonders of old NEWSPAPERS; and then comes some TECHNO-journalism and writings on WAR and the people who oppose it, followed by a LAST ESSAY that I wrote for The American Scholar on mowing the lawn. I like mowing the lawn, and it didn’t seem quite right to end the book with an impressionistic article on my unsuccessful efforts to master a series of violent video games. You’ll find things in here about kite string, e-readers, earplugs, telephones, coins in fountains, paper mills, Wikipedia, commonplace books, airplane wings, gondolas, the OED, Call of Duty, Dorothy Day, John Updike, David Remnick, and Daniel Ellsberg. In a number of places I’ve changed a title, or restored a sentence or a passage that was cut to make something fit. I hope you run into a few items that interest you.
My thanks go to Jofie Ferrari-Adler at Simon & Schuster, and to all the careful, kind editors I’ve worked with on these pieces, especially Deborah Garrison, Henry Finder, Alice Quinn, and Cressida Leyshon at The New Yorker, Anne Fadiman and Sandra Costich at The American Scholar, Robert Silvers and Sasha Weiss at The New York Review of Books, Jennifer Scheussler and Laura Marmor at the New York Times, and James Marcus at Harper’s.
Most helpful customer reviews
24 of 24 people found the following review helpful.
Cerebral Recalibration
By The Ginger Man
Baker's essays range in length from a page ("How I met my wife") to 27 pages explaining his stand on pacifism. His subject matter varies just as widely. He writes about the difference in the reading experience between a book and text on a Kindle. He decries the destruction (or "weeding") of books from the San Francisco library system as it converts to digital content. Baker lovingly describes Venetian gondolas, New York Times content in 1951, the works of Daniel Defoe and John Updike, Flash Papers from 1841 and Sundays spent at the dump.
As always, Baker turns his eye to things that most of us either do not see or do not know we are seeing. He is intrigued by the writing on the wings of airplanes that can be viewed from his seat ("Press here on latch to ensure locking.") He has noticed that quote marks are no longer used to delineate a characters thoughts in works of fiction and wonders if this is a bad thing. He can talk at length about earplugs or telephones or string.
In a collection of summer memories, Baker juxtaposes the important with the seemingly forgettable. In this essay, he challenges the reader to consider why some events, smells, persons, etc become stuck in memory while others fall out as lost pieces of the past. What is the mechanism that catches shards of time while letting other moments, perhaps with more resonance, drift away forever?
In the end, the most important feature of Baker's essays is not the content but the style of his writing. Lev Grossman of Time summarizes perfectly: "his prose is so luminescent and precise, it manually recalibrates our brains." Because of this, these entries should be selected in a leisurely manner and read slowly. They allow entry into a literate and fascinating mind, much as the reading experience is described by Baker in the essay "Inky Burden." Once the reader has done this, he may not necessarily see the world more fully but he should at least be increasingly aware that there is more to see within the limits of perception and that there is much that is being missed.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
A very, very mixed bag
By Elizabeth A. Root
I have given this book three stars because I think that it mixes the excellent with the awful. When I think of the worst essay, which I will discuss at length at the end of the review, I am tempted to cut back the stars a bit, like to zero, if that were possible. [added later: In the end, I suppose that defending libraries and scholarship in the present is more important than defending the Allies in World War II.]
Nicholson Baker is a hero to some librarians, such as myself, for his challenging of Ken Dowlin, who wantonly destroyed San Francisco Public Library's research collection, and his rescue, with his wife, of what is apparently the last set of Pulitzer's World newspapers. Having lost the fight for the International Trade Commission's research collection, I feel the same pain intensely. I was gripped by these essays. I recently read an article in the Washington Post maintaining that even young people who grown up in the digital age and make great use of the computer often prefer to read books in hardcopy, so they may be around longer than some futurists think.
I also greatly enjoyed his essay "Coins," I loved the description of how the coins piled up upon one another; as well as his essay on Daniel Defoe, Flash Papers, and a few others. Others I found too dull, too idiosyncratic, or too fragmentary to enjoy. One thing that I dislike about Baker's writing is his tendency to include way too much detail, which interrupts the flow of some of even his best essays.
Here begins the diatribe, mine in response to his: "Why I am a Pacifist." Quite a few things are mixed in here, so let me cut the subject down. Unlike Kathe Pollitt, whose excellent review of Baker's The Human Smoke (Nation, April 3, 2008) could also apply to this essay, I have not come to despise pacifists. I don't approve of unnecessary violence, like terror bombings including wartime bombing of targets with no military value; I don't approve of the ill-conceived military adventures that have occupied so much of our recent history, like Dubya's invasion of Iraq.
This was the first essay in the book that I read, and I almost put it down, nay, hurled it across the room, I was so angry. I forced myself to read it twice more so that I could consider it more calmly. Part of the issue is that people defend proposed military actions by harkening back to World War II, so instead of arguing that such reasonings may be faulty, Baker wants to discredit "the good war." I will not accept the argument that he is "providing balance" by presenting a biased and dishonest analysis, nor am I interested in the unnecessary task of pointing out that WWII was not a simple contest between Good and Evil (see the Pollitt quote, below.) We can't know what would have happened, but I think Baker has poor grounds for his assumptions. Baker deals only with the US and GB and not with the Union of Socialist Republics (USSR) or the Eastern front, as well, as the Pacific war with Japan, which makes his analyses incomplete. An end to fighting with GB and the US might simply have given Hitler more resources to attack the USSR, while keeping open the option of renewing hostilities with GB and the US later.
There are two main issues that remain: first, was the idea of a lasting negotiated peace with Germany feasible? I don't think so. Baker completely ignores Hitler's history of breaking international agreements, most famously the Munich Agreement in which he agreed to make no further territorial demands; and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact which he broke as soon as it was convenient to invade the USSR. Prior to Kaufman's speech which Baker so admires, Germany had overrun much of Europe, including a number of neutral nations. I suspect that any cessation of hostilities would have merely allowed Germany to consolidate its empire before continuing its warfare. The stakes were very high, either way: continuing the war insured casualties and costs, but a resumption of war after a broken pact might mean refighting battles that had already caused a loss of life and resources, resulting in an even greater loss. Baker also argues that we could have stopped the war and simply waited for Hitler to die, with no concern about what he might have done in his remaining years. Apparently he doesn't believe that any other Nazi leader would have arisen in his place. No-one can know for sure what never happened, but Baker doesn't convince me that the pacifistic hopes were realistic.
Pollitt comments in her review that: "If you are naive enough to believe that the United States went to war to save the Jews, Human Smoke will disabuse you. But the reader who is surprised to learn that neither Roosevelt or Churchill did a thing to prevent the Holocaust is unlikely to know enough to question Baker's slanted version of other events."
Speaking of negotiations, we come to the second issue: did Great Britain and the United States provoke the Final Solution, and could they have saved the victims by a timely armistice? Baker concedes that Hitler was planning the Final Solution long before the US entered the war, but also claims that Hitler was using the Jews [and others] as hostages to prevent the US from entering the war, and when they did so, the minorities lost their value as hostages and he killed them. Imagine that you are the manager in charge of a bank, or a gas station or a convenience store. An armed robber comes in, steals money, and drags off someone as a hostage, yelling that if you call the police, he or she will be killed. You call the police as soon as they are out of the door. Now imagine that the thief is caught, and the hostage is dead. I can imagine Baker, strong in his sense of moral righteousness, taking the stand for the defense, and arguing that the wrong person is charged with murder. After all, the shooter warned you not to call the police, so obviously you are the murderer since you disobeyed.
When I try to figure out who knew what, when, with regard to the Holocaust, it seems to be a snarl. Nonetheless, that the minorities were in a very difficult situation was clear in the 1930s, and I agree with Baker that the US was morally derelict in not admitting more of them. One entire shipload of Jews managed to leave Europe, but had to return when no-one in the Americas would admit them.
Baker argues that the US and GB could have negotiated at least a cease-fire that would have allowed them to take the minorities to safety. He seems to feel that their failure to do this is more morally culpable than Hitler's decision to oppress and kill them in the first place. Baker's reading of the situation makes it sound so simple! If Hitler was open to such a plan, I am surprised that he didn't suggest it. I have read that there were some 12 million Jews in Europe before the war. So let us suppose that Hitler gave the US and GB one year to take some 10-12 million refugees, Jews and other minorities, probably with only the clothes on their backs, and integrate them into societies ravaged by the Great Depression and, in GB's case, the Battle of Britain. What a bonanza it would have been for him! Time to digest his empire, concentrate on defeating the USSR, and/or repair his forces, and his opponents struggling with such an enormous social burden. Hitler could also restart the fight with GB and the US at his leisure.
It would of course, have also deprived Hitler of the hostages that he claimed he needed against the aggression of GB and the US, as well as adding to those societies more of those clever, controlling Jews who would no doubt have pushed for war against Germany. I have read people who blame American Jews for getting us into WWII. This is assuming that he would have been satisfied having the minorities elsewhere rather than having them dead. Baker also ignores the harsh fact that the idea would probably have been enormously unpopular in the US and GB. Even in countries that routinely accept immigrants, people don't generally like huge influxes of foreigners, especially all from one place or if they are somewhat exotic; and they like them even less during times of economic crisis; and when they were Jews, Gypsies (Rom), homosexuals, and communists, they were likely to be even more unpopular. Not a flattering assessment of the allies, but Baker has already demonized them. The moral imperative of trying to save the minorities doesn't negate the practical difficulties that Baker ignores.
Baker also argues, with no evidence, that peace would have caused the German people to rise up in revolt against Hitler. Actually, such a diplomatic triumph might have reinforced his popularity That also leaves the tiny issue of abandoning the other European nations and their suffering people.
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful.
Essays that (mostly) work
By Sam Quixote
This is a collection of Nicholson Baker's essays from the 90s to 2011, taking in subjects as far ranging as libraries and their stock, bits of string, learning to play "Modern Warfare" on Xbox, reviewing the Kindle, as well as providing short bios of Steve Jobs and David Remnick. As you would expect, the essays vary in quality but for the most part they are entertaining, informative, and compulsively readable.
I actually read his article on Kindle 2 a couple of years ago in the New Yorker and still found it interesting to re-read even if his arguments are moot as a lot of the problems he identifies - screen transitions and resolution, placement of buttons - have been fixed in newer versions of the device. But after Baker's effusive recommendation of Michael Connelly's novel "The Lincoln Lawyer", I ended up reading it, loving it, and reading and loving more of Connelly's books - and to you reading this, I as effusively recommend "The Lincoln Lawyer".
Baker writes fascinating and funny articles on Wikipedia, Google, Daniel DeFoe and his book "A Journal of the Plague Year", and David Remnick. He's also able to take mundane objects like string and turn them into hypnotic essays, while I thought the structure of his essay of events that happened one summer to be an inspired and riveting approach to memory and recollection, as well as some vivid and poetic observations.
Not that the whole book was brilliant, I did have some problems with a few essays. The book is divided up into categories like "Life", "Reading", "Technology", "War" and so on. His numerous articles on libraries and archiving went on a bit too long. The first few were interesting to read but by the end of the section "Libraries and Newspapers" I didn't want to read any more essays critiquing libraries sending thousands of stack books to the dump. I get it, you like old stuff, move on!
I abandoned his essay on gondolas as it was too boring - Baker has a habit, oftentimes good, of over-describing things and while I usually enjoy this approach, the extensive descriptions of gondolas and their history overwhelmed me with boredom. The same could be said of his description of a protest march in DC against the wars in the Middle East, while his essay on computer games was strangely humourless and uninteresting. It read like exactly what it was: an old man doing something he hadn't done before because he knew he wouldn't enjoy it and proving that he was right while misunderstanding why people younger than him enjoy them. Disappointing.
While it's not a perfect collection, when I read an essay I liked, it was always brilliant and enlightening and I can away feeling wiser and happier, and that's a rare gift for any writer to possess. Also having read a number of Baker's novels it's interesting to see the passing interests he mentions being the root of certain books. Like he mentions studying how to write erotic novels in 2006 and, sure enough, in 2011 he published an erotic novel called "House of Holes" while his essays on libraries led to his book "Double Fold" and his discovery of newspaper articles from the 1930s would lead to his controversial revisionist history book "Human Smoke". Altogether "The Way The World Works" is an oftentimes brilliant collection of essays from a superb writer which is well worth a look even if you end up skipping a few articles along the way.
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