Nicholson Baker's Checkpoint
Welcome, dear readership, to the Y.P.R. Book-of-the-Month Club, wherein this humble journal will select a book each month (thus upholding the promise implied by the club’s namesake), and encourage good, old-timey satire based upon said book (thus negating any semblance to a real book club). At the end of the month, we’ll run the barrage of parodies, deleted chapters, foreign mistranslations, screenplay adaptations, off-topic reviews, random thoughts whilst reading, or whatever else you creative folks dream up, and pick a book for the following month.
In the interest of keeping things relevant and zeitgeisty, the inaugural B-o-t-M-C selection is Checkpoint, the political thriller by Nicholson Baker, in which this one guy wants to assassinate President Bush, and his friend doesn’t think that’s such a hot idea, and the two talk about it in a D.C. hotel room for 115 pages. Not even—more like 114½. You can zip through it in an hour, easy. The first sentence goes like this:
JAY: Testing, testing. Testing. Testing.
And it just keeps getting better.
Lame-ass creative springboards for the uninspired:
- Czechpoint.
- Chuckjoint.
- El Punto de Comprobación.
- Nickie B’s Chick-o-Rama.
… But we expect you creative folks will likely come up with far better ideas.
Thanks. Happy reading.
Mootpoint by Will Layman
My Almost Interminable Conversation with Famed Literary Minimalist, Nicholson Baker
Reviews for Nicholson Baker’s Checkpoint that I Started to Write before Realizing I Was Thinking of Something Else by Matthew Tobey
Nicholson Baker’s Checkpoint is a tour-de-force roller coaster of a book, the hotly anticipated sequel to The Old Testament …
Bugs Bunny and Yosemite Sam Synopsize Nicholson Baker’s Checkpoint by George Motisher
“I’m a-gonna kill that varmint president and no flea-bitten rabbit’s a-gonna stop me.”
Checkmate by Geoff Wolinetz
Bobby Fischer has summoned his old foe, grandmaster and former World Chess champion Boris Spassky to his hotel room in Reykjavík, Iceland, the site of their 1972 match …
Checkmate, Checkpoint! by Amy Shearn
A deleted chapter.
How to Conduct a Sincere Discussion Group on Nicholson Baker’s Checkpoint with a Disruptive Norwegian Forest Cat on the Premises by Tony Antoniadis
The bodegas are always well stocked with “loosey” magic bullets and Brazilian Mojo Hammers of Justice.
Gina Gershon and the Persian Subway Plot, or, There Are No Wheat Thins in Tehran by Jason Kucharsky
The following transcript of a hotel-room conversation by two Iranian diplomats has been translated from the Farsi by some Persian kid who works the coffee stand outside the N.Y. headquarters of the F.B.I.
If Checkpoint Were Based on Conversations I’ve Had with My Grandparents by Jeff Barnosky
“Why are you so picky anyway? I bet you wouldn’t even kill Hitler if you had the chance.”
Some Failed Parodies of Nicholson Baker’s Checkpoint by Josh Abraham
William Shakespeare’s Chequepoint
