The Night Bookmobile by Audrey Niffenegger

I had not read a single graphic novel until I recently bought a copy of Audrey Niffenegger's The Night Bookmobile. I read it in a few moments. Yet days later, I'm still thinking about it and recommending it to friends.

Niffenegger, who wrote the novels The Time Traveler's Wife and more recently Her Fearful Symmetry, is a gifted artist and writer with an imagination like no other author I've read.

In The Night Bookmobile, Niffenegger's main character is a young woman named Alexandra. She is a book lover who apparently lives on Chicago's North Side, Niffenegger's hometown, and who enjoys long walks in the middle of night. Once, in the predawn hours at the corner of Ravenswood and Belle Plaine, Alexandra happens on a battered Winnebago driven by a Mr. Openshaw who runs a most unusual library inside it. Readers do not check out books from this library. Rather, they find copies of books identical to those they have read since childhood, even their own diaries.

Years pass before before Alexandra, who becomes obsessed with books and the bookmobile, sees it and Mr. Openshaw again. By then, her boyfriend has left her, she has become a regular librarian and all the time been reading, reading, reading -- in a comfortable chair, with a flashlight at night, in the tub while she bathes. Ultimately, Alexandra's obsession takes a bizarre, tragic turn -- one that readers will far better understand if they read Niffenegger's "After Words" at the end of this short book whose the pages are appropriately black and the words are white.

Without giving away any spoilers, we learn in the "After Words" that Niffenegger not surprisingly has always loved books and that she based this graphic novel, the first of a series she plans, on an H.G. Wells' short story, "The Door in the Wall," and on a book-filled dream she had as a teenager. The Night Bookmobile, she writes, is ultimately "a cautionary tale" and one about "the claims that books place on their readers."

For me, though, books remain a pleasant alternative to television, the Internet and the like. Through a book club, they gave me a way to make friends in a new hometown. They've given me cause to think about other ways of life, other cultures and ideas. And they have allowed me to travel to places many times, places I might never get to go any other way.

Still, a cautionary note of my own: This is not a book for children. It is clearly for adults, not because of language or sexual content, but because of the theme and the tragedy that takes place within it.