Nicholson Baker Getting Into Your Head

The Mezzanine is written with a style much like that of my own thoughts. While Baker often goes into much more thorough detail than my mind, it's still almost creepy that he manages to replicate the almost illogical connections between thoughts that goes on in my (and I assume most other people's) head. Every deviation seemed natural; even every insignificant footnote seemed significant, because each related so cleanly and understandably to the topic of the main text it was born in. I never realized it before, but I tend to think about similarly irrelevant items and events, and then proceed to over-analyse even less relevant aspects of them. I almost found this scary. The Mezzanine is excruciatingly boring, tedious, and, as I have said, irrelevant. If my thoughts really sound the way it sounds, shouldn't that mean I find myself boring? No, it doesn't. I can sometimes sit alone for an hour doing nothing but playing with my own thoughts without getting bored at all. What is the difference between Howie's thoughts and mine that makes his dull and mine interesting if they are so eerily similar? I think the reason for this relates to a small but important point I made earlier: Baker goes into an extreme depth that I usually reserve for things I am absolutely fascinated by. Most people don't make lists in their heads of how frequently certain they think about things. The art of thinking, as far as I think, involves putting minimal effort into most thoughts, and only putting real effort into those that really interest the thinker. Baker forces us to put that effort into every thought, spoiling the book for the majority of the time. The only subject Baker wrote about that I thought was interesting enough to deserve the extra effort was the part where Howie convinced himself that the death of neurons in the brain was a good thing, and then listed the benefits. The rest of the book was as if a drunk person started recording a voice memo and forgot what he was recording, so he just went on trying to fill up the tape.