I screwed up my reading order for the first few days of last week. I blame whatever drugs they had me on.

Somewhere in the mix I read Nicholson Baker's A BOX OF MATCHES. It's a 33-chapter work, each chapter representing a winter's morning where the narrator wakes, lights a fire, makes a coffee, and sits in the dark.

I confess it was the cover that attracted me most of all.

As Nicholson Baker points out in his new novel -- a marvel of ship-in-a-bottle miniaturism that no one else could have written, or would have thought to write -- the decorative patterns on paper towels change through the years in response to tastes and fashions, articulating the larger cultural flux as effectively as art museum biennials.

See how Baker's book is unquestioningly called a novel? And this despite having no narrative and probably no fiction. It reads, after all, like the kind of thing a writer might start each day with: a series of exercises undertaken before the real work begins.

I don't mean to imply I didn't like the book -- I did. Though it was slight and unambitious. It was as soothing as a good flame fire, but it really worked itself up to nothing.

He repeats this ritual daily for a month or so, until he depletes his supply of wooden matches, then abandons it as abruptly as he started. The great, tidal rhythms that usually govern literary storytelling -- ambition and frustration, love and loss, innocence and experience -- are replaced here by something more arbitrary, more digital. When time is up in this novel, time is up -- ready or not.

It is, in effect, plain. I suspected there'd be a melancholy that might evolve from the solitary winter mornings, & there is just a hint of that. But it never reaches the levels of lyricism I realised I was expecting.

Though, of course, my standards for lyricism have been set reasonably high ever since I read Thomas Lynch' THE UNDERTAKING, a stunning, small book about a poet who is also an undertaker. A book of minutia that expands to the themes of living and dying effortlessly. Given the care and respectfulness of his prose, I imagine Lynch to be a noble and notable undertaker. His is a trade that 'bears witness' to life -- and I mean both poetry and undertaking. He writes with a compelling calm and gentle intelligence, and he makes death OK. It's a big ask, but that's part of Lynch's power.

"That winter and spring on the west coast of Clare my life and times began to make some sense. And though this weary century of change is having its way with even Ireland now, I return to that place as one does to a well, a source, for the sense that it gives me of something true.

"Thus, undertakings are the things we do to vest the lives we lead against the cold, the meaningless, the void, the noisy blather, and the blinding dark. It is the voice we give to wonderment, to pain, to love and desire, anger and outrage; the words that we shape into song and prayer."
-- Thomas Lynch, THE UNDERTAKING

Oh, and one more comment on Nicholson Baker:

Ever since his early novel ''The Mezzanine'' (1988), the story of one man's journey up an escalator, Baker has made an astonishing specialty of showing just how much is going on in life, and in our heads, when it seems that nothing is.

One man's journey. Up an escalator.

Worst thing is, I instantly love the idea of it, the potential grandeur of the 'miniature ship-in-a-bottle' details. But I suspect it, too, would be plain.