Baker 🗞️ Slow News Day #7

Hey,

I recently read Nicholson Baker’s Room Temperature. It’s a curious little book. A shade over 100 pages and set in the soft-lit mundanity of a new father’s internal monologue as he feeds his infant daughter.

A tiny postage stamp of a setting. A pinhead of a plot. But somehow so incredibly expansive and enrapturing.

The entire book is an ode to slowness. The detailed tangents in which Baker delights to explore are reflections of the tiniest nothings. A collection of coloured paper tags he finds in a suit jacket pocket, peanut butter variants, a set of rubber doorstops that somehow generate a pages-long missive on colour theory and language.

And Baker does it all in a challenging writing style. Sentences run for a dozen lines at points. Paragraphs are sparsely distributed across short chapters. Time and time again, I’d find myself retracing my steps after losing one of the multiple threads I was following in a sentence.

In a novel built on the smallest observations, and the depth of detail and meaning contained therein, Nicholson’s most masterful achievement is to gently bend the reader’s pace into a slower, more reflective one.

The book shows and tells a love note to slowness.

It’s a wonderful way to spend a weekend.

Slow down guide

Need a little help moving slower?

Ease your way out of Friday afternoon with this newsletter, a nice cup of something, and a little background music. Steal my setup if you aren't sure where to start.

After I press send, I’m going to have a cup of Crankhouse Coffee’s Finca Wiwitz roast. I'd link you to that specific coffee, but it looks like it’s sold out and been removed from the site. No coffee lasts forever, right?

I used to find that disconcerting. I’d find a brew I really liked and start to fret, because I knew there would only be so much of it in stock and that, at some point, it'd no longer be available.

But isn’t that more reason to savour it? To get every last drop of enjoyment out of every last drop of coffee?

I’d recommend taking a look at the rest of Crankhouse’s offerings if you’re after a great brew from a wonderful business. Their 130b café is one of the things I miss most about Exeter.

While you enjoy a gentle dawdle around their digital shopfront, I’d recommend playing Sylvan Esso’s album Free Love. Partly because I know Tony, Rosie, Katie, and co often have it playing in the café.

Take it easy,