Building Stories

Building Stories contains in its large cardboard box (260 pages and 14 easy to misplace accessories, as the Library of Congress catalog entry describes it) a reading experience that is so unique that even formulating a response requires some extra thinking.

If you're not familiar, Building Stories consists of a stiff food out cardboard diagram, like a game board, and 14 story elements ranging in size from a simple paper comic strip to a newspaper broadsheet, and ranging in concept from a straightforward graphic novel to a strange beehive daily newspaper. There is no prescribed order to the experience, which spans over 200 years of time and principally concerns the residents of an apartment building in Chicago.

In high school, I was browsing our school library's (pathetic, and even more so in hindsight) fiction section, and came across Julio Córtazar's Hopscotch. Unfortunately, at that time I barely knew how to read and didn't know anything. I remember reading a section or two, completely baffled, and giving up. That seed planted a love of text and story games in me forever.

As with a well constructed chance story, the sequence I chose to read Building Stories in was perfect. The story probes time, serendipity, loneliness, and most especially the way that humans almost never know what kind of story they are in while they are living it. If I have any criticism of the story, I did think that the emotional tone of the stories was too unremittingly bleak. Maybe that's the criticism of an optimist or a romantic (I'm afraid that I might be both) but it also took away surprise as every story ended in a moment of alienation and loneliness.

Read it! I want to meet the other 87 billion versions of me that chose to read it differently. Chris Ware has created something remarkable.