So after my moment of self-pity regarding my lack of control around libraries, I powered my way through several books so that I could return them … and get more. One day at a time, alright?

The Complete Maus by Art Spiegelman There can’t be many people who don’t know the story of Maus but in case you don’t, it’s a retelling of the Holocaust with the Jews as mice and the Nazis as cats. At least that’s what the basic overviews will tell you but what they don’t tell you is it’s so much more than that. Without wanting to sound flippant there has evolved certain tropes around cultural explorations of the Holocaust in our society – Maus ignores and explodes all of these.

It’s heartrending in its factual account of the lives of Spiegelman’s parents, Vladek and Anja, and their survival through WWII and Auschwitz, and the portrayal of Art’s relationship with his father Vladek. There’s no glossing over the dark realities in order to portray the easy dichotomy of Nazi=bad, everyone else=good. It was war.

Chaucer by Peter Ackroyd. On a completely different note, Chaucer is a brief biography of … Chaucer (surprising, non?). I have really enjoyed Ackroyd’s previous novels and non-fiction (London in particular is a work of stunning history) but this was unfortunately pedestrian. Bah.

The Colour of Magic graphic novel. Not Terry Pratchett but the next best thing! Pretty enjoyable actually, though I always find with graphic novel adaptations that you wish they didn’t rush through them so fast. Would it be so hard to do an indepth version? Or perhaps that’s not the point. Fun, even if the illustrations could never match (in my mind) Josh Kirby’s fantastic cover art for the pre-2001 Discworld books.