Last week I read Nicholson Baker’s new novel, The Anthologist, all in an evening sitting propped uncomfortably across the smaller of two sofas in my apartment. One thing about reading Nicholson Baker is in his exorbitantly minute and often startling descriptions (his first novel, The Mezzanine, is simply the thoughts of a guy during a ride up an escalator, which sounds boring but is incredible), you might think that it would then be easy to get caught up in the vibe, overthinking ideas and elements as you sit in the presence of a master doing the same. And yet, Baker is so good at catching all the spillage of thought you might have in listening to him speak, there is actually very little loosening of one’s own awareness while in the grip of even such an often everyday-aimed and frank voice as he wields. I hardly even recognized how uncomfortable I get usually while reading. It all went down, as have all of his books, leaving me hungry and excited, even in, again, a seemingly arbitrary subject matter: The Anthologist is about a guy, Paul Chowder, preparing to write the introduction to a poetry anthology. There is simply probably no one else alive who could pull this off, and Baker does, quite so.
Do you read on the toilet? If so, what kinds of books do you read on the toilet? Is there a set of criteria that you have in mind when selecting a book to read on the toilet? Do you sometimes stand at your bookshelf and stare at your books and struggle to select just the right book to read on the toilet? Does it take so much time that you sometimes risk having an accident right there in front of your bookshelf? Or do you keep a book next to the toilet to avoid such confusion? When on the toilet, do you read a new book or a book you’ve already read? If you do read on the toilet, what was the last book you read on the toilet? Or do you already have a list of books to read on the toilet? Do you ever read a book on the toilet and think ‘haha, I’m reading on the toilet’? Have you ever been reading a book on the toilet and not stood up from the toilet after you were finished because you got so into the book that you couldn’t stop reading on the toilet? Is it possible that there exists out there a perfect book to read on the toilet?
