Room Temperature

Nicholson Baker

On an autumn day, at around three-fifteen in the afternoon, Mike sits down in the rocking chair to feed his infant daughter, Bug. The novel that unfolds over the next twenty minutes of Mike's life is a warmly comic masterpiece of observation, reflection and digression. Baker brilliantly recreates Mike's roving mind, with its tangential thoughts about peanut butter and its big questions about fatherhood, marriage, and love. The result is surprisingly thrilling to read: funny, linguistically exuberant, tender and alive to the small mysteries and pleasures of everyday life.