Since 2020, my bookbag has been at home more often than not, so this has also become a place to share the books I’ve found myself reading in bits and pieces.

Originally, I bought Democracy with last year’s MARM in mind, for Margaret Atwood’s contribution. It opens with a piece by Elif Shafak, which positions democracy as part of an ecosystem, with reflections on nature. “While the human internet is just a few decades old, the ‘fungal internet’ has been around for millions and millions of years. And unlike us, trees have managed to use their interconnectivity in a position and constructive way.”

Kristen Zory King’s Ladies Ladies Ladies (2025) landed in my stack thanks to the linked story collection Irregulars by Kerry Trautman, circling around a waitress’ single shift in a dinner in middle America. Stanchion’s subscription service was irresistible and a great way to support small presses in the United States that value independent thinking and diversity in storytelling. Eighteen “vignettes” are linked thematically, assembled from a series of moments in the ladies’ lives. You could savour one each day like poems, but I gulped them in one sitting. The phrase that returns to my mind is a subversive sort of melancholy. Despite loneliness and uncertainty, there are moments of ferocious joy. These are the stories that exist in the moment after you’ve wiped the mist off the bathroom mirror with the meat of your fist (this actually happened).

“Callie didn’t have a tragedy of her own so she collected others, keeping them in her pocket and running her fingers against each scissored edge until they were so familiar by touch, so warn to the warmth of her fingertips, that she could almost believe they were hers.”

The speeches in Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s 2010 collection, I’m Not Here to Give a Speech (in translation by Edith Grossman, 2014) are not very long—he hated giving speeches, apparently). And I’m not a very experienced Márquez reader, but I still enjoyed the expanse of material, from a speech made in 1944 to his graduating class, to one celebrating the 40-year-anniversary of One Hundred Years of Solitude (also the 25th anniversary of his having received the Nobel Prize) in 2007. I read just one or two in a sitting, and I was left craving more of his work. 

Jan Zwicky’s and Robert V. Moody’s Sixty-Seven Ontological Studies (2022) is a slim volume with 49 of Zwicky’s spare, thoughtful poems and 18 of Moody’s striking, evocative photographs. Even in paperback it’s an elegant volume—set in type by Robert Bringhurst and printed by Hemlock Printers. Some days I marvel most at the words: one favourite is the pair “Skin” and “February”. Other days, the images: with one favourite being Independence Pass in Colorado, the perspective aligned so we peer through a series of ruined wooden doorframes with a mountain as backdrop. A note at the end explains that the volume had been previously published in 2020 with only 56 Studies, so it’s not unreasonable to hope we will soon have 78 or 89.

Other piece-meal reads include Kate Beaton’s early comics (more about her longer work next week). I’ve borrowed these from the library before, and I made the mistake of reading them like a graphic novel. She describes having written them when she should have been studying or working. Instead, she would dash off a few frames—often reflecting what she was reading or learning. Hers is a niche audience—she does name her historic figures and sometimes there’s a paragraph beneath that offers some context but, you know, the longer it takes to explain a joke, the faster the giggles fade.

My favourites in Hark! A Vagrant (2011) were the Nancy Drew mysteries and the Austen panels. And in Step Aside, Pops (2015) she shifts her focus from Austenmania to Brontëmania and, affectionately, declares “May we always have a mania to sustain us.” One that really made me laugh had two characters from Pride & Prejudice lounging around and then complaining that the dratted characters from Wuthering Heights were approaching, about to ruin the mood. There are also more Nancy Drew bits, but because I happened to be rereading The Secret Garden, that spread really made me laugh. And the riffs on historic Hallowe’en cards were good fun too.

Alongside, I was reading single chapters in Art Spiegelman’s classic graphic memoir Maus (1980-1991). Originally published in his own magazine, Raw, I first read this years ago, when one had to request it at the library’s reference desk. There I was directed to the children’s library, which was downstairs and a long corridor away. Maus was kept there, behind the circulation desk, where it was immediately checked out to me (not simply added to my stack of other loans). All that I remember about that first reading is it provoked my reading of other graphic novels and memoirs: no notes, no journal entry. It could be that I simply didn’t have the vocabulary to adequately react. That I only let it wash over me and, then, returned it so another reader could be stunned into silence.

What I didn’t remember was that the story is framed as the son recording his father’s story, so that we know from the beginning who survives (the father and mother) and who doesn’t. I also didn’t remember that there’s some humour in the back-and-forth about the interview process. There is one scene where his father makes his son’s coat (sophisticated but bland) disappear, so that he has to wear home a loudly patterned waist-length anorak type thing with a zip, very similar to his father’s very “stylish” jacket, that provoked a full laugh. The history recounted is complicated but skilfully arranged to create a throughline (despite his father’s memories coming from every direction) and to represent his mother’s experiences too, although the couple had been separated in Auschwitz, and later his father had burned her diaries. After it was published in the mainstream (1986 Volume I; 1991 Volume II), it received the Pulitzer Prize in 1992—A Special Award in Letters—and it’s no longer shelved with the children’s books.

Also I have borrowed the first in a series of Spanish graphic novels translated into French in 2023: Alfonso Zapico’s Le chant des Asturies. They have just the kind of intricate line-drawings that I love, with particular detail in outdoor landscapes and architectural structures, domestic scenes and daily life (brickwork and cobblestones, minescapes, stuff laid out on a desk, or paintings and decorations on a wall). So far, Zapico reminds of Joe Sacco (although how useful is that comparison when I’ve not finished even one of his books?!). And, as with Joe Sacco’s books, I find myself spending as much time online researching elements of history as I spend with the books themselves; this independent region of northern Spain and its miners’ role in the Spanish Revolution are fascinating, although the specialised terms in French are a challenge.

What have you been reading in bits and pieces? Or packing in your bookbag?