100 books like I Love Dick

To learn about the Holocaust, I read personal remembrances, eyewitness accounts, and detailed descriptions of ghettos, camps, and transports, but this graphic novel based on Spiegelman’s father captured me like none of the others. Its words tell its terrible story masterfully and its drawings fill in what words can’t say, both as his father lived it and as his son learns about it. Banning it from U.S. schools would be completely wrongheaded. It should be required reading.

This short, engaging book mixes fact and fiction, prose and poetry, documents and photographs, to tell the story of Billy the Kid, from the time Pat Garrett sets out to hunt him down to his killing. At times it is beautifully hallucinatory as it gets inside Billy’s mind, showing his dreams and visions. But it is also very lucid and attentive to detail, vividly depicting how Billy is always protecting and exercising his left hand—the hand he shoots with—as well as showing Billy’s interactions with his fellow outlaws. This is Ondaatje’s earliest and most experimental novel.

Markson had early success writing traditional novels (one was even made into a movie starring Frank Sinatra) but his real body of work came after when he started writing novels that were criticized for not being novels. The first of these, This is Not a Novel, is narrated by a writer who asks whether it is possible to have a novel with no plot, no main character etc. In a form that visually resembles about 150 pages of tweets (but written before Twitter existed), Markson takes a spirited, enjoyable romp through the history of art, literature, and philosophy, with a sharp eye focused on how various creative people lived and loved, but especially on how they died. 

Bluets is a work of fragmentary nonfiction so overwrought, and so filled with tears and heartbreak, that I return to it for solace whenever I’m wrought with such feelings.

It begins with the claim that the narrator has fallen in love with the color blue.

She writes of different encounters with the color’s pigments and presentations, as well as Joni Mitchell’s Blue, the biology of color, philosophy of perception, and more like this, all while she is blue: lonely, heartbroken, sad.

Bluets is beautiful, intelligent, heartbreaking, consoling; it is not afraid of to weep.

Just like Nelson describes wishing to ingest the color blue, not knowing what else to do with its beauty and the longing it produces in her, I sometimes wish I could ingest this book. 

Sheila, a playwright, is trying to figure out how to be in the world, and she’s using her best friend Margaux, a visual artist, to help get her there. This book is filled with trenchant observations, sharp dialogue, and the twists and turns of a female friendship with all the emotional intimacy, creative cross-pollination and cannibalization, rupture and reconciliation that happen during the formative years of young women in their mid-twenties trying to be somebodies. But that doesn’t begin to describe the pleasure of reading this astute and hilarious story that begins with the idea of an ugly painting contest. It will make you examine your own world anew.

This book is brilliant and heartbreaking. I’ve read everything by Gabrielle Bell. I marvel at her artistry, her linework, her drawing and composition and incisive visual storytelling. If I sound like a fangirl it’s because I am. Everything is Flammable is a dark, funny, brutal, honest story, full of heart and originality. When Gabrielle’s mother loses everything in a fire, Gabrielle uproots her east coast life and heads west to rural California to help. But she has her own issues, and the trip pulls her back to her semi-feral childhood as she and her mother try to build a new home on top of the ashes. It’s a searing examination of a mother-daughter love, with illuminating artwork, immediate and poignant visuals, and mordant observations.  

Over Easy is the first part of Madge’s story, followed by The Customer is Always Wrong. They can be read separately as each stands on its own, but are best absorbed one after the other. These books are visually inventive and full of unforgettable characters who leap off the page and lodge in your imagination. The story follows Madge, an open-hearted artist who finds refuge and adventure in the wise-cracking, fast-talking, drug-taking world of the Imperial Café where she gets a job as a waitress after being denied financial aid to cover her last year in art school. Full of wit and pathos, Mimi Pond captures the perfect balance of hilarious and heartbreaking, all with fantastic drawings. She makes it look easy!

I started this book because I liked the drawing style. Within the first 3 pages, I couldn’t put the book down. It’s not just Jennifer Hayden’s illustration skills or the freshness of her lines and patterns and mark-making and the way each panel is a masterpiece in itself, it’s the story that pulled me in. This is a book about life and love and family, told with humor, insight, and intelligence. In Jennifer Hayden’s words, the book is “a dramatic comedy sewn together from real events and real emotions,” but that doesn’t begin to convey the richness and depth of this narrative journey and the quirky sarcastic honest way it tells it like it is. The story still resonates long after I finished reading it.

Crusoe is a failed slaver, a reckless son, a bad sailor, a pretty crap boss, a parrot lover and, in all of that, he shows us how damaged and imperfect a system we have inherited.

I love Robinson Crusoe for its audacity. When it was first published in 1719, readers were furious to discover that there was no such person as Crusoe but that, instead, the story was fabricated by one Daniel Defoe, who had recently spent three days in the stockades for seditious libel. I love the insanity of this story, how it wants us to believe that a man spends 28 years on a deserted island and still comes home to England richer than when he left. A flawed novel but our first in English, it is also our first autofiction. 

As a writer, I am always pondering the question of how our lives inform our work. As one of my fellow writers, Melissa Ostrom, put it, our experience is the rich compost from which we form our fictional narratives. To use a Freudian dream analogy, I like to think that our lives are the “day residue” of the work—elements from daily life show up in different contexts or transformed in some other way. The twentieth-first century has witnessed an explosion of so-called auto-fiction, fiction that more consciously underscores this process of transforming life into art—think of the work of Ben Lerner, Rachel Cusk, and Karl Ove Knausgard. This recently-released anthology, edited by Caitlin Forst, features work by established writers as well as new voices that interrogates the relationship between writer and text, between art and life.