The Night Bookmobile

I can't praise 'The Night Bookmobile' highly enough. It's painfully astute in recognising the thin line readers negotiate when losing themselves in and to books. And as a meditation on life it is utterly heartbreaking.

Read it, weep, read it again, weep some more: and try looking at your own shelves in the same way afterwards. It simply cannot be done.

I wish I could give this 3.5 stars. Most of the book is lovely, hinting at some kind of larger world behind the books. I love the idea that there is meaning to be found in the collection of everything a person has read.

Then the main character kills herself. She's escaped into books her whole life, and eventually ends her life to make that escape complete. What?! No! Books should /enhance/ life, not replace it! So. Much. ARG!!!

The author noted that this is supposed to be the beginning of a larger work. I do hope that, in context, books aren't a reason to die.

Niffenegger’s love for and wariness about libraries is threaded through her best-selling first novel, The Time Traveler’s Wife (2003), and blossoms poisonously in her first graphic novella. An artist given to elegantly eerie and clever drawings, as seen in her two illustrated novels, Niffenegger makes supple use of the graphic format in this pensive and unnerving story. Alexandra is out walking late one night on a quiet Chicago street after a fight with her boyfriend when she happens upon an old Winnebago that turns out to be a magical mystery bookmobile open between “dusk and dawn,” and piloted by Robert, a gentleman librarian who serves tea. Even more strangely, its collection comprises every book Alexandra has ever read. She show more is galvanized. She looks for the bookmobile every night and longs to work with Robert. Years go by. Alexandra reads incessantly and becomes a librarian. Yet still she is refused a place on the bookmobile, until one especially grim night. With beautifully complex perspectives, lustrous and moody colors, and refined expressiveness, Niffenegger has created a haunting cautionary tale about solitude, obsession, and the unfathomable power of books. Originally serialized in the Guardian in England, this is the first provocative volume in a larger work titled The Library. While the book is best suited for adult collections, teens who like classy and psychologically subtle spooky tales will shiver happily over this gorgeous short story as well. -- Seaman, Donna (Reviewed 10-15-2010) (Booklist, vol 107, number 4, p36) . show less

The Night Bookmobile by Audrey Niffenegger was first serialized in The Guardian. I came across it through a number of book blogs that seem taken with the cover of Alexandra hugging the book she's reading. As I had so enjoyed Three Incestuous Sisters, I knew I wanted to read this graphic novel.

Alexandra, angry after a fight with her boyfriend, wanders the streets one night. In her perambulations she discovers a night bookmobile, driven and maintained by Mr. Openshaw. His library on wheels oddly has every book she remembers reading, including the odds and ends she used as book marks. These aren't just books she remembers reading, these are the books she read — many long lost and forgotten.

Rather than be completely grossed out by such an show more eerie thing, Alexandra finds a new obsession to fill the void in her life. She desperately wants to be a bookmobile librarian. She wants to apprentice under Mr. Openshaw. She does everything she can, including going to library school. Though she finds a new career as a librarian, it isn't the one she dreams of.

Alexandra does ultimately reach her goal, but through extra-ordinary means. Her blinding obsession with books and a particular book mobile plays into a recurring theme I've seen in books or films where a librarian is the main character — loneliness and depression — the librarian who hides in her (almost always her) books. Niffenegger just takes it one doozy of a step further.

Like Alexandra I've had an on again, off again affair with books and libraries. My first library encounter was also with a bookmobile — though we didn't actually get to into the vehicle — they were brought to us in a rented storefront. I don't see reading as a solitary, lonely or depressing thing. It's not a substitute for human interaction — it enhances those interactions. A librarian's primary function is to connect people and books. There's more human interaction than reading involved in the job.

Also like Alexandra, I do sometimes dream about driving a bookmobile. In California that would require going back to driving school and getting a class C license. At the moment, I'm ready to be done with school, but maybe in a year or two, I'll revisit that dream. show less

A short graphic novel about a woman who, wandering the streets of Chicago at night, encounters a battered Winnebago inside which is a library containing everything she's ever read. I find this idea utterly irresistible, largely because for many, many years I've repeatedly imagined just such a library of my own, with all the books of my life shelved in order, and wistfully longed to be able to visit it and see my life's reading spread out in front of me: the well-remembered classics and the forgotten volumes, the picture books giving way to kids' books to the books that shaped me in my teenage years and on through the slow progression of my changing adult tastes...

Unfortunately, while seeing that dream brought to life on pages in front show more of me was wonderful, the main character's unhealthy obsession with her own Night Bookmobile library was less so, and the ending rather put me off. Ah, well, at least I can dream of my own Bookmobile in the full confidence that I'd handle the experience much more sensibly. And if the moral Niffenegger is trying to convey here is that too much love of books is unhealthy, she can bite me. show less

Audrey Niffenegger is best known for her novels, The Time Traveler's Wife and Her Fearful Symmetry, but she has also published two illustrated novels, The Three Incestuous Sisters and The Adventuress. The Night Bookmobile is her first graphic novel.

I don't normally read graphic novels but the author and the story of this one were a combination I couldn't resist.The Night Bookmobile quickly follows Alexandra through years of her life focusing on her encounters with the night bookmobile. Alexandra stumbles upon the bookmobile and it's librarian, Mr. Openshaw, late one night and finds that it contains all the books she's ever read, children's books, novels, textbooks, and even her girlhood diary. I was just thinking about whether books you show more didn't finish would be on the night bookmobile - would there be partial books sitting on the shelves? - when that question was answered. (You'll have to read it yourself to find out what the answer was...sorry.) Alexandra becomes obsessed with finding the bookmobile again and eventually goes to library school to become a real librarian. That's as much as I want to say about the story.

Despite the short format, Niffenegger hits on a number of important ideas - the state of libraries, the role of reading in our lives, having a love of reading, and burying oneself in books. She nails the passion for reading but conveys the important message of not letting books take over your life. This message really struck me because the very afternoon I read this I was reluctant to go out because I wanted to read. Needless to say, after reading The Night Bookmobile, I left the house.

Niffenegger first wrote The Night Bookmobile as a short story, which she then adapted into a serial graphic novel for the London Guardian. According to the "After Words," The Night Bookmobile is the first installment in a larger work called The Library. This first installment packed such a big punch in so few pages that I can't wait for the next installment to appear. show less

The Night Bookmobile made me dream. It’s a graphic novel about a woman out on a late night walk (she’s quarreled with her fella) and happens across a bookmobile. She discovers that within this odd sight is everything she’s ever read. From all her books to her own diary. I gasped when I read that. For that is truly a reader’s dream! I wanted to find a night bookmobile of my own. I imagined the forgotten treasures I would find in my own version. My childhood diaries, Archie comics, picture books, magazines, my favorite series and books, books, books of all sorts. What fun!

Alexandra is equally smitten. She seeks out the bookmobile again and again, but it never turns up and it is years till she sees it again. In the meantime, she show more goes to library school and becomes a librarian herself, with the dream of one day working in the night bookmobile. And all the time reading, not just for herself, but also for her personal collection: “Like a pregnant woman eating for two, I read for myself and the librarian.”

I’ve never quoted from a graphic novel before but here were such gems:

“In the same way that perfume captures the essence of a flower, these shelves of books were a distillation of my life.”
“Each spine was an encapsulated memory, each book represented hours, days of pleasures, of immersion in words.”

It is such a dreamy story. But the ending tossed me out of my dreamy state – I won’t spoil it for you, if you haven’t read it yet. I still wouldn’t mind coming across my own night bookmobile though. show less