"The Anthologist" is narrated by Paul Chowder -- a once-in-a-while-published kind of poet who is writing the introduction to a new anthology of poe...
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Aug 17, 2011
Paul
rated it: 
Yes, hello! Take a seat - that one, please. No, just shove that stuff on the ground somewhere, it's just books and papers. Have some tea. Well, since you ask, not too bad - not too bad at all. This? Oh yes, it looks terrible doesn't it, I should have changed my shirt. It's all from this little scratch here, see? Doesn't look like much but there was a lot of blood. Well, I picked up this lovely little cat you see, and it just kind of reached out and took a chunk out of me. Just a pretty little c
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Aug 13, 2011
Nancy
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Well, this may be the most delightful book I have read this year.
Paul Chowder's life isn't going particularly well. Sometime poet and current anthologist, he is struggling to write an intro to his anthology of poetry, Only Rhyme. But his chronic procrastinating has left him without a girlfriend, without cash, and, it sometimes seems, without hope. Paul longs to win Roz back by completing the intro, but instead he seems to spend a lot of time sitting on his driveway in a plastic More...
Paul Chowder's life isn't going particularly well. Sometime poet and current anthologist, he is struggling to write an intro to his anthology of poetry, Only Rhyme. But his chronic procrastinating has left him without a girlfriend, without cash, and, it sometimes seems, without hope. Paul longs to win Roz back by completing the intro, but instead he seems to spend a lot of time sitting on his driveway in a plastic More...
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Apr 27, 2011
Ruth
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Take one measure of writer’s block, add an equal measure of a longtime lover lost, mix in the mind of an intelligent self-deprecating, funny, out-of-sorts and out-of-fashion poet and get one of the best books I’ve read this year. It helps if you like poetry. There are a lot of references to poets and poetry gossip. But it’s all written with such ease and grace that the nonpoetry reader can still just sail through. Sad, funny, and wonderful.
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Apr 13, 2011
Courtney
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A washed-up middle-aged poet who has recently lost his girlfriend through his chronic inability to finish the introduction to the poetry anthology he's meant to be assembling (which will - if he can get it out - rescue rhyming poetry from the clutches of free verse) should not be such good company.
But right from the opening line ("Hello, this is Paul Chowder, and I'm going to try to tell you everything I know.") I fell for Paul Chowder. Nicholson plays Chowder as both artfu More...
But right from the opening line ("Hello, this is Paul Chowder, and I'm going to try to tell you everything I know.") I fell for Paul Chowder. Nicholson plays Chowder as both artfu More...
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Aug 02, 2011
This was one of those books that makes you wonder if you are in fact smart enough and/or cynical enough to truly appreciate it. But I did enjoy it. It's very short compared to things I often read, and yet there were parts that took me ages to muddle through. In some ways it's nothing more than an exploration of someone's every day despair--you get the feeling that the narrator is pretty sure a lot of people pity him, and he's kind of doing his best to be worthy of that. On the other hand, he's j
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Jan 16, 2012
Cynthia
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When I read a review of Nicholson Baker‘s latest novel, I knew it was my kind of book. The main character is a poet. With writer’s block.
That was enough to get me to buy the book, and wow did I have fun reading it. I can’t remember how long it’s been since I laughed so much with a book. I’ve never read Baker before, but he’s funny. And smart. And he gets so many things just right: about teaching, about writing, about poetry.
Not that his character is a font of wisdom. Exactl More...
That was enough to get me to buy the book, and wow did I have fun reading it. I can’t remember how long it’s been since I laughed so much with a book. I’ve never read Baker before, but he’s funny. And smart. And he gets so many things just right: about teaching, about writing, about poetry.
Not that his character is a font of wisdom. Exactl More...
Dec 29, 2011
Sam
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Paul Chowder is a published poet but not famous in his chosen field. He's putting together an anthology of poetry that rhymes - "Only Rhymes" - is the title and he's having trouble writing the 40 page introduction. He's also coming to terms with the fact that he will be known as an anthologist rather than a poet, and his relationship with his girlfriend is breaking down, and he too might be having a breakdown. But he's going to let us, the readers, into his world of poetry where he wil
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Aug 23, 2011
Sabra
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Rhyming is the genius's version of the crossword puzzle--when it's good. When it's bad it's intolerable dogwaste and you wish it had never been invented.
That's from chapter 4 of the Anthologist, my favorite chapter which emphasizes the link between the link between depression and the concocting of poetry. Also...
Rhyming is the avoidance of mental pain by addicting yourself to what will happen next.
Another zinger is in chapter 8:
...spending your life concentrating on deaMore...
Aug 02, 2011
In my opinion, nothing Nicholson Baker has done gets less than five stars, so I'm hardly the one to ask. This one is a welcome return, after lots of shorter and nonfiction contributions, to something resembling his original and best style: not quite the brilliantly fanatical miniaturism of Room Temperature, The Mezzanine, or The Fermata—which is sort of to Updike what Jimi Hendrix is to Elmore James—but the brutally honest, free-flowing, and painfully vulnerable writerliness of "U and I."
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Jul 03, 2011
Emily
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I loved this sweet, funny book about poetry and writer's block! Five reasons:
In one section, the main character writes about how poetry's importance in any given life waxes and wanes, with most people getting full up in high school or college English. I think it's time for me to make poetry wax strong in my life again (15 years after the last flowering).
I had forgotten how much I enjoyed Elizabeth Bishop....this book reminded me.
The moments from the narrator's life More...
In one section, the main character writes about how poetry's importance in any given life waxes and wanes, with most people getting full up in high school or college English. I think it's time for me to make poetry wax strong in my life again (15 years after the last flowering).
I had forgotten how much I enjoyed Elizabeth Bishop....this book reminded me.
The moments from the narrator's life More...
May 09, 2011
Holly
rated it:
I read several of Nicholson Baker's books many years ago, and, to be frank, I found his stream -of-consciousness style tedious, bogged down in minutiae so that it resembled the mind-workings of the self-absorbed who feel compelled to tweet, text, e-mail and blog their every thought, every sensation.
However, in THE ANTHOLOGIST, Nicholson Baker's style serves the story well.
Paul Chowder, the narrator of the story, longs for the passionate, suicidal depression of the Great Poets, but his More...
However, in THE ANTHOLOGIST, Nicholson Baker's style serves the story well.
Paul Chowder, the narrator of the story, longs for the passionate, suicidal depression of the Great Poets, but his More...
Apr 25, 2011
Lisa
rated it:
I was given this title by a friend who thought I might like the book. He, apparently, is a huge fan of Baker. While I was delighted for someone to share a book with me when it usually works in reverse, in truth, the book languished on my bedside table for months. I just wasn't sure that a book about poetry could possibly engage me the way I like to be engaged with a great novel. Feeling guilty pressure about returning the book to its rightful owner, I decided I couldn't really put it off an
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Mar 24, 2011
Bennet
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Paul Chowder is trying to write the introduction to a new anthology of rhyming verse, but he’s having a hard time getting started. The result of his fitful struggles is The Anthologist, a brilliantly funny and exquisite love story about poetry. (from the cover blurb)
It’s also a love story about his amiable but ambivalent and sad break-up with girlfriend Roz, which is prompted by Paul’s procrastinating.
Reading his meandering and rueful narrative is like listening to an ol More...
It’s also a love story about his amiable but ambivalent and sad break-up with girlfriend Roz, which is prompted by Paul’s procrastinating.
Reading his meandering and rueful narrative is like listening to an ol More...
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Feb 26, 2011
switterbug (Betsey)
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Paul Chowder is a minor poet and a perennial procrastinator. Although recognized at one time for a few brilliant poems, he has waned from the public eye. He is given the opportunity to resurrect his name and his bank account by writing an introduction to an anthology of poems, but he dawdles and delays the project. Paul spends his days reflecting on his career; the recent departure of his girlfriend, Roz (who left him due to his dilatory ways); the need to organize his office; his neighbors; and
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Feb 21, 2011
Nathan
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A book of fiction is like a long car trip, where you're trapped with these characters for the journey. You hope that something makes the journey interesting: the characters, their conversation, or the incidents along the way. Some novels have the distinct feeling of a slow car journey through unchanging landscape with the dullest companions on earth. Not "The Anthologist", where the narrator (Paul Chowder) is such an interesting chap that we can't help but find the time has flown by
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Feb 12, 2011
Fred
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The plot of The Anthologist is minimal. Paul Chowder, a minor,some might say, failed, poet is working on an anthology of rhymed poetry and has a writer's block when it comes to completing the Introduction. He lives with a woman named Roz, and she is upset by his constant procrastination. So upset that she moves out, and that's pretty much what happens in the novel when it comes to plot. But Baker, via Chowder, tells us what we're in for instead of a lot of plotted action on the very first page:
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Jan 12, 2011
Adele
rated it:
Paul Chowder I Love You
Sadly Paul Chowder only exists in Nicholson Baker’s latest novel 'The Anthologist', which was more like finding a soul-mate to me than finding a good read. Baker’s main characters tend to have obsessions which he follows with the attention to detail their own compulsions drive them to focus on. But Chowder is a little different to the anti-heroes of previous controversial novels who gained Baker a massive following by displaying the power to freeze women and remo More...
Sadly Paul Chowder only exists in Nicholson Baker’s latest novel 'The Anthologist', which was more like finding a soul-mate to me than finding a good read. Baker’s main characters tend to have obsessions which he follows with the attention to detail their own compulsions drive them to focus on. But Chowder is a little different to the anti-heroes of previous controversial novels who gained Baker a massive following by displaying the power to freeze women and remo More...
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Jan 07, 2011
Jayaprakash
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This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers.
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Oct 21, 2010
Vivian
rated it:
This is very clever and frequently amusing short novel. First-person narrator Paul is an American poet (!) and failed college poetry teacher who is trying to write an introduction his edited anthology of rhyming poems, ONLY RHYME, but he suffers from severe writer's block, not to mention some obvious symptoms of undiagnosed anxiety/possibly a bit of depression. Woebegone Paul takes us on summer's journey through his half-baked efforts, his doing anything and everything to avoid actually sittin
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Aug 15, 2010
Lobstergirl
rated it:
I approached The Anthologist warily, not exactly being a fan of Mr. Baker, or of the idea of fiction focused on poetry. And indeed I nearly ditched the book after 30 pages, unsure if I wanted to read an entire book about a, well, kind of loser - a guy whose girlfriend has just left him because he can't make himself write a 40 page introduction to a poetry anthology, who has no income, and who seems content having a mouse live behind the control panel of his stove. Truth be told I read the book
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Mar 30, 2010
Mark
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When he's at his best, as he is here, Baker can make a claim to being a sort of American Mini-Nabokov: smart, clever, witty, insightful, and eager to teach.
Paul Chowder, the book's narrator, is a hard-luck unemployed schlub of a poet and professor who's procrastinating writing the overdue introduction to an anthology of poetry he's edited. Instead of writing the introduction, which his publisher is waiting impatiently for, he narrates this book, which ends up being a fantastic (if More...
Paul Chowder, the book's narrator, is a hard-luck unemployed schlub of a poet and professor who's procrastinating writing the overdue introduction to an anthology of poetry he's edited. Instead of writing the introduction, which his publisher is waiting impatiently for, he narrates this book, which ends up being a fantastic (if More...
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Feb 27, 2010
Kerfe
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I didn't just like this book, I enjoyed it. Start many things, never finish? Use distraction to keep from doing what I need to do? Hands working on one task, mind totally in another location? I identified; I sympathized. I laughed.
While he procrastinates, Paul performs useful tasks (like cleaning his office, walking the dog, mowing the lawn) and holds an inner conversation on poetry and rhyme, with side meditations on the downward spiral and mundane rhythms of his daily life. Th More...
While he procrastinates, Paul performs useful tasks (like cleaning his office, walking the dog, mowing the lawn) and holds an inner conversation on poetry and rhyme, with side meditations on the downward spiral and mundane rhythms of his daily life. Th More...
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Dec 31, 2009
Alan
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Paul Chowder, the first-person protagonist of this breezy novel, has some significant things to say about the mechanics of poetry and its place in modern culture—you'll learn a lot here, most of it painlessly—but he is having desperate difficulty saying them in a coherent, linear fashion.
Consider this sequence, a paragraph-and-a-half, from early in the novel (p.55):
Consider this sequence, a paragraph-and-a-half, from early in the novel (p.55):
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"Isn't crying a good thing? Why would we want to give pills to people so they don't weep? When you read a g
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Oct 24, 2009
Christine
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This book is a plum. Nicholson Baker has written a totally amazing book that everyone should rush out and buy…immediately. I do not say these things lightly.
Let me start again, to give this book its just review. Is it possible for a book to be better than any graduate poetry seminar and still be hilarious? Yes, and the book that accomplished that is “The Anthologist.” It’s an unlikely combination, but when completed (to borrow a back-of-the-book blurb writer’s analogy) it’s like hav More...
Let me start again, to give this book its just review. Is it possible for a book to be better than any graduate poetry seminar and still be hilarious? Yes, and the book that accomplished that is “The Anthologist.” It’s an unlikely combination, but when completed (to borrow a back-of-the-book blurb writer’s analogy) it’s like hav More...
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Oct 14, 2009
Rick
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Woah Nicholson Baker has a new book out? I found this randomly in the JFK Terminal 4 bookstore - I used to be such a huge Baker fan, but he had a long gap between novels, and then that novel came out about assassinating the president, and that sort of turned me off. But upon seeing this one, I gave it a chance.
It's vintage Baker - pedantic, meandering, plotless, academic... I love that about his books, so this one roped me in a bit as well. It's got no footnotes, and - gasp! - it ha More...
It's vintage Baker - pedantic, meandering, plotless, academic... I love that about his books, so this one roped me in a bit as well. It's got no footnotes, and - gasp! - it ha More...
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Oct 08, 2009
Jaci
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I loved the character, a poster-child for procrastination and for over-thinking everything. And for relating everything to the "spume of poetry that's just blowing out of the sulphurous flue-holes of the earth." p.19 In the process of writing (not writing) an introduction to a poetry anthology, he addresses rhyme, scansion, and a multitude of poets that I love, most especially Mary Oliver. Glorious.
p.19: "It's hard to hold it all in your head. All the different possible More...
p.19: "It's hard to hold it all in your head. All the different possible More...
Oct 04, 2009
Jeff
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“The Anthologist” is narrated by Paul Chowder, a poet struggling to write the introduction to a new anthology of poetry after his girlfriend of eight years leaves him. As he reflects on the recent demise of his relationship as well as the great poets throughout history, he muses on everything from badminton to iambic pentameter, from butter flavored butter to the purpose and beauty of rhyme. Baker is a fascinating storyteller – a writer with a talent for purposeful rambling. His books seem to me
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Sep 26, 2009
Avi
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from page 222:
“One day the English language is going to perish. The easy spokeness of it will perish and go black and crumbly-maybe-and it will become a language like Latin that learned people learn. And scholars will write studies of Larry Sanders and Friends and Will & Grace and Ellen and Designing Women and Mary Tyler Moore, and everyone will see that the sitcom is the great American art form. American poetry will perish with the language; the sitcoms, on the other hand, are ne More...
“One day the English language is going to perish. The easy spokeness of it will perish and go black and crumbly-maybe-and it will become a language like Latin that learned people learn. And scholars will write studies of Larry Sanders and Friends and Will & Grace and Ellen and Designing Women and Mary Tyler Moore, and everyone will see that the sitcom is the great American art form. American poetry will perish with the language; the sitcoms, on the other hand, are ne More...
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Sep 20, 2009
Tony
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Baker, Nicholson. THE ANTHOLOGIST. (2009). ****. Paul Chowder, an on-again-off-again poet, introduces himself in the first paragraph. He lets us know...”(that) I’m going to try to tell you everything I know. Well, not everything I know, because a lot of what I know, you know. But everything I know about poetry.” It seems that Chowder has just finished selecting and editing an anthology of poetry – poetry that rhymes – and he needs to write the preface/introduction. He’s having a terribl
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Apr 03, 2010
Amanda
rated it:
This book is described on the dust jacket as being a love story to poetry, and it sure is, but it is also an great example of the "art" of procrastination.
Narrated in a Stream of Consciousness style by Paul, a man who has been commissioned to write an introduction to a poetry anthology but can't seem to get down to business. As a bit of a master procrastinator myself I enjoyed his myriad mental rabbit trails. However, at times it reads like the chatter of an 11 yr old boy who i More...
Narrated in a Stream of Consciousness style by Paul, a man who has been commissioned to write an introduction to a poetry anthology but can't seem to get down to business. As a bit of a master procrastinator myself I enjoyed his myriad mental rabbit trails. However, at times it reads like the chatter of an 11 yr old boy who i More...
