A book of ephemera by Nicholson Baker is the equivalent of a magnum opus by most other American writers, and vulnerable to equivalent failings  not over-reach but under-reach. Baker (pictured) takes small subjects but he leaves them small, failing to summon in his work as a journalist (broadly defined) the transformative energies on display in his novels (The Mezzanine, Room Temperature, A Box of Matches, The Anthologist) and in his exhaustively confessional memoir about his love-affair-from-afar with John Updike, U & I: A True Story. Too often, when confronted or presented with a grain of sand in which to see the world, Baker just sets about describing it, molecule by molecule.

In his brief foreword, he explains that when he was starting out, he felt that he was "helping to bring back the personal essay", but 30 years on, it is a form with which he continues to struggle. Asked by the Nouvel Observateur to write an essay in April 1994, he interprets the brief narrowly: "I took my daughter to school," and so on. You can only imagine the fallen expression on the face of Dan Crow, the editor of the anthology How I Write: The Secret Lives of Authors, when, having nurtured such high hopes, he received the email bearing Baker's 38 words on wearing earplugs ("I buy them from the drugstore  I can sit any where, in any loud place, and work").

Even "La Mer", the liveliest essay in the opening section ("Life"), is compromised by a fundamental error of judgment. It concerns a trip to the Eastbourne Grand Hotel, where Debussy adjusted the orchestration, and corrected the proofs, of La Mer. The putatively central moment comes in the final sentence when Baker looks out of a window and "thought I saw, for a moment, what Debussy had seen". But the epiphany, so conventionally placed and phrased, can only fall flat after Baker's memorable claim that Debussy's use of "the whole-tone scale" has been worn out by "cop-show soundtracks", or the description, right there in the opening paragraph, of his first proper encounter with Debussy's music: "I put on the heavy, padded headphones, that were like inflatable life rafts for each ear, and I heard Debussy's side-slipping water-slopes, with cold spray blown off their crests, and I saw the sudden immensity of the marine horizon that followed the storm, and I was amazed by how true to liquid life it all was."

Baker has followed Updike's habit in collecting all of his journalism, every ribbon-cutting speech and potboiling review, but when Updike wrote about, say, his favourite hour of the day (11am) or his favourite spot in New York City (West 155th Street), he turned each lame-duck commission into a thing of beauty (you only have to compare Baker's "Coins", about working at a shopping mall, fishing the coins out of the fountain, with "Early Inklings", Updike's contribution to the same New Yorker series of reflections on First Jobs). And he was offering the results alongside meatier reflections on, say, Mark Twain and the 1950s and the portrayal of New York City in literature. Baker only emulates Updike the boy  enchanted by the everyday, harbouring a fetishist's fear of e-books, praising the "cheery", rejecting the "frosty"  not Updike the man of letters.

A memorial address about Updike entitled "The Nod" has its moments, or rather its moment. Baker recalls spotting his hero in the Boston Public Garden, and decides instead of bothering him, he would simply nod ("I would pack in everything I knew about him in my nod, all my memories I had of reading about packed dirt and thimbles and psoriasis "). Otherwise, it's a desultory piece of work, the feelings Baker experiences no more rawly expressed than the feelings he predicted experiencing when he imagined Updike's death 20 years earlier in U & I ("immortality" becomes "ongoingness").

In the final essay, "Mowing"  essentially a rewriting of the contented-sigh passages that close Updike's memoir Self-Consciousness, with Sunday morning exchanged for Saturday, and orange juice for coffee  Baker writes that curiosity "is a way" (is a way?) "of ordering and indeed paring down the world"; but the kind of "curiosity" he displays is all too easily sated. Having asked "why" Wikipedia is so popular, he writes: "Because it has 2.2 million users, and because it's very often the first hit in a Google search, and because it just feels good to find something there." To invoke by way of an answer the high number of users is to draw a perfect circle. Surely its placement on Google was, at least initially, a product of popularity? And that "just" is the rhetorical equivalent of shrugged shoulders and raised palms.

Some of the essays aim for charm or warmth, others for penetration, none for both. The jacket copy says that Baker "surveys our fascination with video games", but that's exactly what he doesn't do in "Painkiller Deathstreak", essentially a review of a handful of video games he failed to master. The essay, which rambles on for 7,000 words, is in some ways the most typical, turning something that Baker doesn't like  violence, warfare  into something he does  play, imagination, "explorable specificity"  without acknowledging any connection between the two. He allows himself to be analytical only about things that disagree with him. Otherwise, he is mostly content to skim the surface  and to offer the reader whipped cream.

The exceptions are few but thrilling. Writing about commonplace books ("Narrow Ruled"), Baker gets right to it from the opening sentence ("When I come across something I really like in a book, I put a dot in the margin") and never flags, delivering a gathering of quotations about the gathering of quotations. In "Grab Me a Gondola", a long, laidback (as it were) piece of reporting, he makes a case for gondoliers over water taxis that is romantic where his case for print books over e-books is both sentimental and pragmatic. An essay about the treatment of interior thought in fiction ("I Said to Myself") succeeds in treating the subject with a mixture of levity and hand-wringing seriousness. It also provides a keyhole history of modern literature in which Tom Clancy and Stephen King are presented as "post-Faulknerians", on account of their taste for italics.

This is a book that can't, obviously, deliver on the promise of its title. But the spirit of its title is in keeping with its author: a writer who, for all the fantastical leaps of his fiction, is inexhaustibly curious about the fabric of day-to-day life. Baker looks for the world in a grain of sand  and the more you read him, the better a place that seems to start looking.

Here, among biggish reported pieces and tiny essays, the shortest of which is three paragraphs, is a sketch of Baker's preoccupations. There are five main sections: Life, Reading, Libraries and Newspapers, Technology and War. Even to a Baker fan  and I count myself firmly in that number  this isn't essential Baker, though there are glories. A handful of the articles are still available online, a couple for free (Painkiller Deathstreak, on video games, and The Charms of Wikipedia, one of the standouts), which seems to me a bit of a swizz. Many of the pieces rehearse familiar themes. Why I Am a Pacifist is essentially a footnote to Human Smoke, his provocative book about the second world war. Libraries and Newspapers opens with a shot of cold and meticulous anger about the evisceration of the San Francisco public library  and is followed by another bit that covers similar ground (and if you've read his book Double Fold...).

His account of attending a peace protest in Washington DC opens with an effortfully excellent description of the "pale, squinty, early spring perfection of the day": "The squirrels were out doing seasonal things. A tree was balancing big buds on the finger-ends of its curving branches; the brown bud coverings, which looked like gecko skins, were drawing back to reveal inner loaves of meaty magnolial pinkness." There is your echt Baker  precise, unexpected and comical. But the piece that follows is a report of a peace protest that could be anyone's report of a peace protest.

And yet: there is a ferociously good essay  at once thoughtful and really funny and offhand  on the technical challenges to the novelist of rendering your characters' thoughts. (Italics? Direct quotes? Indirect speech?) He gently mocks the successive literary-historical advances proposing less artificial ways of doing so  as if by changing the punctuation you could vanish the difference between printed prose and neural activity. That essay is all the better for picking its examples with puckish even-handedness between revered classics and airport fiction ("the post-Faulknerians, such as Tom Clancy").

There's a great thing on Daniel Defoe. There's something cute and scholarly on mid-19th-century sensation mags. And there's a review of a book by a guy, Ammon Shea, who spent a year reading the OED cover to cover. The payoff is the work of a man who really knows how to bring a paragraph in to land: "The effect of this book on me was to make me like Ammon Shea and, briefly, to hate English. What a choking, God-awful mash it is! Surely French is better. Then I recovered and saw its greatness afresh. The OED, Shea notes, is 'a catalogue of the foibles of the human condition'. Shea has walked the wildwood of our gnarled, ancient speech and returned singing incomprehensible sounds in a language that turns out to be our own."

Baker is sometimes accused of luddism, but his love for card catalogues is at one with his love of the internet. He completely  completely  sees the point of Wikipedia. He's on the fence about Kindle but ends that essay generously, with a nicely tempered description of losing himself in an airport thriller on the device.

Baker's real position is that what is important isn't a fight between paper and plastic: it's that we pay attention to as much as possible as faithfully as possible. We owe successive generations to understand and pass on what previous generations knew: not just at the level of dates 'n' facts, but breathing humanity. That's why he's angrily nerdy about archives: as he repeatedly emphasises, a run of 1950s newspapers tells you more about what it was like to live in the 1950s than practically anything else on Earth. Yet these objects from the recent past are rarer than first editions of Birds of America.

So this isn't essential Baker. But the nature of Baker's worldview  microscopically and encyclopaedically attentive; morally puritanical; heroically unselfconscious and ingenuous  is one that makes the distinction between essential and inessential moot. If the inessential is where we live, everything is essential.