[zachrose]

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.)