The Mezzanine

The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker A man goes out to buy shoelaces and a cookie during his lunch break, but the story is packed with insane levels of detail about the objects around us and the narrator's imagination about how those details came to be. One such detail: the way a plastic straw will float in a can of soda until it's horizontal, but sometimes the microscopic burrs in the pull-tab opening will dig into the straw and keep it from doing that. (Baker is a much more entertaining writer than I am.)

I would heartily recommend "The Mezzanine" by Nicholson Baker. It is an excellent written account of an unnamed mid-level corporate employee riding the escalator to his office after getting some lunch. The large majority of the novel is set inside his thoughts as his ruminates over the minutiae of everyday life. What makes the book so brilliant is that Baker has an incredibly inquisitive mind. Ordinary things like straws or shoelaces become the subject of several pages worth of digression on manufacturing processes, design decisions, economics, human relationships, and so on and so forth. He is really able to look at devices that we take for granted and explore the history behind them and what makes them so interesting yet so forgettable despite being ubiquitous. It is a beautiful book and splendidly written. I read it in one sitting I was so captivated by it.