As the trees on the mountains yellow and redden, most mornings feel chilly enough to pull on an indie bookstore sweatshirt before pitter-pattering to the kitchen to fix a latte. With autumn’s arrival, my reading habits—like the foliage—shift in notable ways. I reevaluate reading goals. I consider what subjects or genres or vibes I hope to focus on. How many books can I finish before that big disco ball drops from the sky?
Something about the shortening days, lamps that click on earlier, and candlelit dinners urges me to slow down, turn inward. Whenever I find myself struggling to choose my next read or trying to meet lofty bookish goals, I often seek graphic novels and memoirs. With their refreshing combination of art, speech bubbles, and breath between panels, they can be a comfort to a speed-reader. Even though the format allows swiftness, many titles encourage readers to ruminate on each artwork and word, to linger on every page.
Personal reading objectives and preferences aside, I return to literature because it moves me and expands my world. If you, too, crave pensive reads as the year wanes, I’ve collected four thought-provoking graphic novels and nonfiction books that made me dog-ear, reflect, scribble notes, and investigate further.
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Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama by Alison Bechdel
Examining art, desire, diaries, dreams, and the mind, this analytical graphic memoir studies the oeuvre of Donald W. Winnicott, a pediatrician and psychoanalyst, and how it informs Bechdel’s experiences and relationships, especially the complicated one between her and her mother, a theater actor and parent of three drawn to poetry, literary criticism, and crosswords. Referencing texts such as Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, and her father’s love letters alongside Bechdel’s progress in therapy sessions, I added multiple books to my TBR list while rereading. How can someone finish this introspective work by the author of Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic and not apply a presented theory or revelation to their own lives and connections?
Feelings: A Story in Seasons by Manjit Thapp
Spanning one year, Thapp’s beautiful graphic novel unfolds in six chapters, each highlighting a season as an artist readies for a solo exhibition. The lyrical prose and stunning art prompt readers to notice the changing weather, the once thriving windowsill plants drooping. From the confidence and inspiration of “High Summer” that dwindles with the doubt and mounting pressure of “Late Summer,” this spurs readers to understand how their environments affect their well-being, professional life, and social calendar. Do you thrive with longer sunshine or under the gray sky in the embrace of a cozy sweater? Do you connect with the protagonist who, in “Winter,” knows, “I’m not alone in feeling this way, but I’m lonely all the same”?
Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts by Rebecca Hall, illustrated by Hugo Martínez
Beginning in New York then London, Dr. Hall, the grandchild of enslaved people and an attorney defending tenants’ rights, a professor, and a historian, searches for “women warriors” in archival records. Through thorough historical research, she “constructs the likely pasts of women rebels” who attempted to liberate themselves and others from slavery during 1700s New York and the Middle Passage. In Martínez’s black-and-white illustrations, the past and present mingle: hands reaching out to a sleeping Hall, a rude passerby’s street window reflection revealing a ghost. Meditating on ancestry, Black womanhood, erasure, justice, and rebellion, this book blending, both graphic novel and memoir ,welcomes us to look beyond the histories we’ve been given, to uncover truths.
What It Is by Lynda Barry
In the inaugural installment of this beloved “Creativity” series, each page contains a universe. Packed edge to edge with collage and text, I flounder between wanting to finish it and wanting to sit with it until I’m certain I’ve spotted everything: the postmarks and cancelled stamps, bird after bird, and each and every list. Barry—while featuring profound, day-halting questions like “Is a dream autobiography or fiction?” and “Can thinking exist without images?”—prods us to dig deep, to stay open and devoted to filling blank pages, and this includes activities and instructions for creating writing materials to support us in those endeavors.
If you long to dive deeper, check out these philosophical reads, fiction exploring What if, and the best philosophy books of the last decade.
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