So, I finally received last week's The New Yorker in the mail (thanks for nothin', U.S. Postal Service), and I was struck by the cover drawn by graphic novelist and Sacramento native Adrian Tomine.
Called "Shelf Life," the clever nine-panel cartoon is enough to depress any striving author - or anyone who cares about the decline of reading for enjoyment and has seen the latest dreary reports on literacy.
It's kind of like Kubler-Ross' "stages of death." In panel one, you see the author plugging away at the keyboard, then the somewhat humiliating pitching to the publisher, followed by publication, the act of reading by a book lover, then the inevitable discarding, followed by the burning of the book for warmth by a homeless man.
The longer I gazed at the cover, though, the more heartened I got. In a way, books provide warmth and comfort to people on various levels. So is it better for a book to be remaindered and pulped, or put to use to comfort the homeless?
Tomine's cartoon does what the best graphic stories do - makes us think.
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