SOURCE: Malin, Irving. Review of The Size of Thoughts, by Nicholson Baker. Review of Contemporary Fiction 16, no. 3 (fall 1996): 201.

In the following review, Malin offers a positive assessment of The Size of Thoughts, commenting on the deeper themes within the collection and Baker's other works such as Vox and The Fermata.

I remember my first reading of The Mezzanine, I was puzzled by the obsessive attention to detail (especially in the footnotes). Baker used much space for references to Marcus Aurelius and mall design. Why did he consciously cultivate the details? Was he linking consciousness to detail? Was he, in effect, writing a philosophical novel that masquerades as a satire?

In his first collection of essays [The Size of Thoughts,] Baker gives us a wonderful, perverse essay on the linguistic turns of lumber. He endeavors to locate not only its first usage in the OED; he searches concordances to...