Book of the year?

I am indebted to what appears to be a blooper in the Times Christmas Books round-up for pointing me in the direction of something I feel I ought to have read. Joe Dunthorne's 'book of the year' is Nicholson Baker's The Anthologist. Alas for quality journalism, this book - I now discover - did not come out this year, or even last - not in hardback, anyway. And there was not legitimate reason for the plug to be in the middle of the 'sports' section. Still, it looks, as Dunthorne avers, like a cracker.

[On a doubly-related note, time was if you looked up either of my articles on the Spectator website you got a note saying 'No further articles by Joe Dunthorne.' This unexplained mystery has since been rectified.]

Books begun - quarter ending October 16th

The Fermata - Nicholson Baker
Samuel Johnson - Walter Jackson Bate
Post Office - Charles Bukowski
The Emperor of Scent - Chandler Burr
The Yiddish Policemen's Union - Michael Chabon
The Last Samurai* - Helen DeWitt
The Inheritors - William Golding
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms - Stephen Jay Gould
The Love-Adept - LP Hartley
I Am Not Jackson Pollock - John Haskell
The Gift - Lewis Hyde
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting - Milan Kundera
The Interrogation - JMG le Clézio
The Washing of the Spears - Donald R Morris
The Blind Eye - Don Paterson
Timoleon Vieta Come Home - Dan Rhodes
A Book of Liszts - John Spurling
Leaves of Grass - Walt Whitman
The Village in the Jungle - Leonard Woolf

* already read

Books I started reading in the last ten days

(in no particular order)

Silk - Alessandro Baricco
Collected Poems 1909-1962 - T.S. Eliot
Borges and the Eternal Orang-utans - Luis Fernando Verissimo
The Mezzanine - Nicholson Baker
Born Standing Up - Steve Martin
The Abortion: an historical romance 1966 - Richard Brautigan
Under the Sun: the letters of Bruce Chatwin - ed. Elizabeth Chatwin & Nicholas Shakespeare

Ouch.

When some of the more intelligent people... ask little probingly polite questions to try to figure me out, I often lie and tell them I'm a writer. It is almost funny to see how relieved they are to have a way of explaining my lowly work status to themselves.

- Nicholson Baker, Fermata

Why do today...

I simply exist, I do the minimum I have to do to make a living, because I know that in a sense everything I want to accomplish (and I am a person with ambitions) is infinitely postponable.

- Nicholson Baker, Fermata

Paging Dr Johnson!

Some articles are vandalized a lot. On January 11, 2008, the entire fascinating entry on the aardvark was replaced with “one ugly animal”.

- Nicholson Baker, on the fun to be had indulging in a spot of Wikabuse.