SOURCE: Korn, Eric. “A Clippings Job.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4853 (5 April 1996): 22.

In the following review, Korn offers a generally positive assessment of The Size of Thoughts, though criticizes the inclusion of several unworthy pieces in the volume.

After the entertaining phonoerotic Vox and the deplorable Fermata (which gave a new, literalist interpretation to the cry, “Stop the world, I want to get off”), Nicholson Baker, to the relief of the rest of us, has turned his hand elsewhere. He is a man of enormous lexical talent, a talent recently deployed largely to describe underwear; and so clinging is literary repute or ill-fame that when he published his deeply researched and deeply felt tirade (philippic, jeremiad, dithyramb) on the subject of the deaccession (as in “at yesterday's auto-da-fé, sixteen Jews and three Lutherans were deaccessioned”) of card catalogues as libraries the world over constructed classificatory castles in cyberspace (or...