Audrey Niffenegger is best known as the author of The Time Traveler’s Wife (which I love), but she’s also a visual artist who has written and illustrated several graphic novels. This one is more like a picture book for adults, clocking in at just 40 pages, with large full-color art and simple, spare text. The plot is both enchanting and haunting: a woman walking alone in Chicago at night stumbles across a bookmobile that contains every item she’s ever read, even cereal boxes (my favorite detail is that in the books she never finished, all the pages are blank after the point at which she stopped reading). In the morning, the bookmobile departs, but she’s become obsessed with it and spends the rest of her life searching for it. She encounters it only twice more over the course of many years, both times with life-changing results.
This story resonated deeply with me, as I assume it should for any dedicated book lover; it captures the fascinating power that books hold over those who read them—their pleasures (you are made of sterner stuff than I if you don’t think the night bookmobile sounds like the supercoolest thing ever), but also their perils (the prevailing tone is dark, particularly the ending). The book took about 10 minutes to read, but its spooky loveliness will stay with me for a long time. I was excited to read in the afterword that Niffenegger plans to make it the first volume of a larger project called “The Library.”
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