The Mezzanine, by Nicholson Baker

Penn Jillette recommended this book, and I'm glad he did.  The Mezzanine is an ode to the active mind.  The book essentially has no plot--the sum total of the action involves buying a new pair of shoelaces during a lunch break--and I suspect many people wouldn't like this book.  But for me it was interesting to read what the main character (really just the author, I suspect) thinks about the little details in his life.  Many of his thoughts demonstrate a healthy curiosity about the world and the little technological advances made in our advanced society--things like plastic vs. paper straws, the mechanics of escalators and the proper way to fill a napkin dispenser.

Baker also has a wonderful way of writing about seemingly mundane subjects in a way that makes them come alive, such as his description of popcorn popping:

I felt somewhat like an exploding popcorn myself:  a dried bicuspid of American grain dropped into a lucid gold liquid pressed from less fortunate brother kernals, subjected to heat, and suddenly allowed to flourish outward in an instantaneous detonation of weightless reversal; an asteroid of Styrofoam, much larger but seemingly of less mass than before, composed of exfoliations that in bursting beyond their outer carapace were nonetheless guided into paisleys and baobabs and related white Fibonaccia by its disappearing, back-arching browned petals (which later found their way into the space between molars and gums), shapes which seemed quite Brazilian and intemperate for so North American a seed, and which seemed, despite the abrupt assumption of their final state, the convulsive, launching "pop," slowly arrived at, like risen dough or cave mushrooms.