Here (Pantheon Graphic Library)

An Amazon Best Book of the Month, December 2014: I love older buildings. I live in one now, and despite the single circuit electricity that shorts-out on a regular basis, the lack of insulation, and other aspects of its “charm,” the place has tales to tell. And I’m a sucker for stories. Who lived there before me? What were their lives like? Whose idea was it to paint the living room baby diarrhea green? But my limited imagination only goes back a hundred or so years, when the apartment was first built. In Here, groundbreaking graphic novelist Richard McGuire takes it much, much! further—visualizing the goings-on in a specific corner of a specific room over the course of hundreds of thousands of years (past, present, and future). The result is an orgy of the ordinary that is slyly clever and unexpectedly moving. McGuire first conceived of Here in 1989. It was a six-page comic whose influence ended up being as enduring as the room in which it is set. So, the arrival of this expanded edition is cause for much celebration in graphic novel circles, and as it turns out, in mine as well. I don’t typically read graphic novels, but Here is anything but typical. And, when I sit in my little corner of the world, I’m envisioning the future for a change—all the book-loving brethren who will inhabit that space after me, who I hope will discover and delight in Here, too. –Erin Kodicek