The Way the World Works by Nicholson Baker – an ideal Christmas present

Nicholson Baker is intensely interested. He looks at the world like he has never seen it before, fixating on the mundane and capitalizing upon the strange lacunae which exist between seeing and understanding. In the purist sense, his interest makes him interesting.

The Way the World Works is a colourful digest of his essays, conference papers, feature articles, and observations, divided into five main sections: Life (his own, principally), Reading, Libraries and Newspapers, Technology, and War. Well over a decade’s worth of eloquent umming and ahhing is encased in a single volume, a follow-up to his first, The Size of Thoughts. It is only in the book’s ‘Final Essay’, from 2004, that he sizes up the near obsession that has led him to grapple with these topics for so long:

‘Only some of the unknown things…are things that you are aware of not knowing, and then within that subset is a smaller set still – the unknowns that pull at you.