Building Stories: Choose Your Own Adventure for Adults

Towards the end of last year, I started to hear about a new "graphic novel" called Building Stories. The basic description is that it's about the lives of the residents in an apartment complex in Chicago, a seemingly straight forward work of literary fiction with pictures. However, Building Stories isn't quite so simple; it features not only a non-traditional narrative structure but a non-traditional physical one as well. The reason why I'm hesitant to classify Building Stories as simply a novel (graphic or otherwise) is because it's not just a single object that you can hold in one hand and read from cover to cover. There are a lot of covers, and lot of things without covers, in Building Stories. Author Chris Ware has put together his narrative through fourteen separate items contained in a larger, sturdy box rather than between two pieces of cardboard.

BASS 2012: "North Country" by Roxane Gay

I've been reading a lot of short fiction lately, and am only holding out until March to get my hands on some more (I cannot resist the lure of Karen Russell, particularly after Michael Shaub called Vampires in the Lemon Grove "magnificent" and "flawless.") and I am loving it. I've never gorged myself on short fiction, but I've always enjoyed it. I think one of the things that really strikes me is that with good short fiction, I can get everything I get out of a good novel, but in concentrated form. Perhaps this is why, as a huge Stephen King buff, I love the novels but adore the short fiction. The last novel I read of his was Under the Dome, and I was massively impressed as usual by his talents as a world builder, but there is something to be said about a writer who can spend a few hundred pages setting up an elaborate literary ecosystem and can also do it in a single-serving chunk.

Currently I'm working my way through The Best American Short Stories 2012, which gets me out of my comfort zone a little since I'm not picking and choosing authors, or even subject matter--I pretty much go into the stories blind, with the exception of a couple that have since become title stories in anthologies of other works by their authors.

Favorite Books of 2012

Obviously I'm a little late on this. We're almost two weeks into 2013, and I've been reading and salivating over best/favorite books of 2012 lists since the end of November, at least. Many of them were influential when I cashed in the gift certificate I got for an early Christmas gift and made my vacation reading decisions (having time off from work is the best opportunity to catch up on all the reading I'm behind on). But I'm very glad I didn't try to pick favorites before the new year rolled over, because the last two books I read in 2012 made this list and the very last one is a book I loved so much that I'm mercilessly forcing it on my friends and will probably be gushing over its virtues for years to come. So without further ado, in order that I read them: