I’ve been meaning to write about this one for a while. If you haven’t heard already, Shane Jones‘s Light Boxes is a beautiful book and should be read. I’m probably not the first person to tell you that. If you only read comics, and you don’t know about this little novel, you should still go and read it. It only has one picture but it will make you want to draw comics. I wanted to draw comics the whole time I was reading it – the images are haunting.

What I really respect about this book is Shane’s total indulgence of imagination (I’d go so far as to say fancy). The guy has fun writing this book and it makes it fun to read. Like any affecting imaginary world, this one bears resemblance to our own (questions of authority and faith are very similar), but more notable to me is the fact the Shane creates a world that is definitely not ours. He invented it! The way people used to. Reading this book brought back the feeling of the first time I read Kafka and Calvino and Barthelme and Davis. I felt sad in that exciting and compassionate way; I felt that I was really caring. Light Boxes pries you from your intellect. Light Boxes is not a pared down, raw, visceral, and dirty work like so much of what’s popular (and good) these days. Its few pages are layered and rich and get you lost in the woods, mired in February.

Oh, and go listen to Shane read a section at Apostrophe Cast if you haven’t.