積ん読, Berlin

Much taken with Jason Lutes’s graphic novel Jar of Fools (2003), I bought the first volume of Lutes’s trilogy Berlin when it appeared in 2004. I put it on a shelf, thinking I’d wait for the other volumes. Years passed. I’d check Amazon every so often. The second volume of Berlin appeared in 2008. In 2009 I found out, bought a copy, and put it on a shelf. Years passed. And now the third volume has appeared. It’s time to read Berlin. I’m five chapters into the first volume, with the other two stacked on the floor. And it’s lucky that I waited: reading Stefan Zweig over the last two years has given me a much better sense of Weimar Germany than I would have had in 2004. And having read Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, I can see right away that novel’s influence on Lutes’s storytelling (montage, quick shifts in perspective).

積ん読 [tsundoku]: “the act of leaving a book unread after buying it, typically piled up together with such other unread books.”

[All three volumes of Berlin are also now available as a single hardcover volume.]