In October 2012, when Pantheon released "Building Stories," the $50 (now $100) graphic novel-in-a-box was described by many people at the time as Chris Ware’s magnum opus. For this architect, who has a few books that come in boxes, it can be seen as the pinnacle of “architectural” box sets. The graphic novel, set in a three-flat apartment building in Chicago, consists of 14 “distinctively discrete” books, booklets, magazines, newspapers, and pamphlets — all totaling 260 pages and all fitting within a large tabloid-sized box. How is it architectural? Not only is the apartment building an integral element in the various stories depicted by Ware in his dense and distinctive comic format, “the organizing principle of Building Stories is architecture,” as reviewer Douglas Wolk wrote in the New York Times upon its release. “Ware renders places and events alike as architectural diagrams.” There is even a cutaway isometric of one floor of the building on the back of the box, accompanied by depictions of the 14 pieces. Many of the comics were originally published in places such as the Times, making the box set a means of controlling the format of the publication — page size, paper type, binding, etc. — at a level beyond the highly controlled layouts of Ware’s logically structured yet emotionally wistful comics. ( )

A $50 box of longing, mortality, and regret, to quote Kevin Guilfoile's apt commentary in the Tournament of Books. It's a heavily visual collection of 14 pieces that make up this work which mostly shows us the life of a lonely, insecure, perpetually unsatisfied, slightly overweight woman. Other main characters are the unhappy married couple living below her, the unhappy elderly woman who owns the titular building they all live in, and bizarrely, a bee who just doesn't fit in.

I lack the patience/interest to spend a lot of time examining the artwork in the panels of graphic novels; I want to speed on ahead to the next chunk of text. I must have a bias for words. Thus my favorite graphic novel I've read (not that I've read all that many) is Persepolis, in which I think the artwork plays a much smaller second fiddle to the star turn of the text. In Building Stories, the visuals demand at least equal consideration, maybe greater.

I think I disagree with most when I say I did not find splitting the story into 14 pieces of varying size, from pamphlet to newspaper to novella, to be a charming feature. I would have preferred a single, standard sized bound book. What a hidebound traditionalist I turn out to be. ( )

Thoroughly depressing, but quite brilliant graphic novel, produced as a collection of small books, newspapers, folded strips of paper, etc. There are no instructions on how to read all of this (I did it from small to large). A slices of life story with a triple pun on the title; the building itself is a character. Includes the story of Branford bee, the greatest bee in the world, and an edition of the Bee times with "God save the queen" in the header. I think the only other graphic novels I had read were Art Spiegleman's Maus I and II, but now I am intrigued... ( )

I received this "book" as a Santathing gift this Christmas. I really enjoyed piecing this story together. It comes in a big box with various artifacts inside that contain parts of the graphic novel. They come in all shapes and sizes, and have no reading order, so it really feels like you are a detective trying to put the events of the main character's life in order. The main character herself is a very ordinary person, which I think is kind of the point. How many huge, beautiful, and exhaustive graphic novels zero in on the inner life of an ordinary housewife like this? Not very many from my reading experience. I loved the minute details in the art work, especially those that feature cross-sections of her apartment building. From this graphic novel, I got the feeling of opening up a doll house and peering into the lives inside. Thank you to whoever bought me this book! ( )

I read this for a class on narratives in the 21st century (that do weird things with time/memory).

I really enjoyed this! Building Stories was a fascinating read & I had so much fun piecing together the different parts and wondering if/how they fit into the bigger story (and whether they were even real). ( )

A pleasure to manhandle! I wonder sometimes what poetry will look like in the 21st century, or what economy means to future authors and artists, or how anyone could portray America in the twenty-teens as anything other than a complete logjam. These are kind of grandiose things to think about at work but as someone who lives in fear of the "new" they're necessary questions to ask. So while a some people think this collection is possibly too depressing (and on one level I'd agree- as character studies these can run kind of shallow) I was personally really excited by "Building Stories" because it shows what print culture can still do and how it can command and keep our attention. I don't use the word "zeitgeist" often (if ever) but this collection really gets the "zeitgeist" of the USA c. 2012 in a way that is poetic, economic and hopeful (at least if reading comics for hours and hours gives you hope.) ( )

It's an epic creation in terms of its scope, so let me start there.

Ten years in the making, Chris Ware's story-experience-in-a-box (I just can't call it a book, and neither could the judges in the Tournament of Books, who ultimately voted it down due to its lack of resemblance to a book) defies the traditional linear notion of a story. I'm not talking about chronology; authors mess with timelines all the time with varying levels of success, but Ware's fourteen-piece story has no particular beginning or end. Open the box and start wherever you want; your understanding of the characters and their lives and emotions and thoughts will form one brick at a time, no matter in what order you choose to read the parts. It's almost as though instead of hearing a story told, you're seeing it...built. It seems similar to the way we construct our identities in life: there's no specific, rational plan so much as there is a back-and-forth of new experiences and reflections on old ones.

"Building" in the title also refers to the three-story apartment building where the characters’ lives converge. At moments, Ware even gives the building its own turn at narration (in a transparently opinionated voice, which seems counterintuitive; I’d expected the building to be the only objective narrator).

Although I granted Building Stories four stars (and even teetered on five) for its ambition, creative genius, and technical skill, if I had graded it on how much I actually enjoyed “reading” it, I would have to give it…maybe one and a half. It’s just sort of anticlimactic (and really, how can a story with no prescribed order really have an effective climax?). It’s also outrageously depressing.

In some ways, reading this was like watching Avatar. It was one brilliant creator’s decade-long project, an innovative offering that was supposed to blow the minds of those who experienced it. But even though I can appreciate all that…I just didn’t much care for it. ( )

Great for those who like: character-driven stories, ambiguous endings (and beginnings), memorable reading experiences. ( )

I didn't know what to expect as I opened the box ... but the cumulative effect of the story I built will stay with me. The play on perspectives and glimpses of people's lives is thought provoking and the illustrations are beautiful. Sweet Bitter Sweet. ( )

Chris Ware's latest "book" is a unique object: a box of 14 mini-books of all different formats, from hardbound "comics" to enormous, sprawling poster-stories. His art is as good as it's ever been. It's surgically precise, stunning, and recognizable as nobody else's but his.

However, narratively, he has entered the darkest, muddiest part of his career. Building Stories is highly depressing even when compared to Ware's other work. Every story, every character, every situation in it is a study in failure, sadness, guilt, hate, disappointment, and misery. The total effect is a claustrophobic, suffocating misanthropy that amounts to pure abuse of the reader.

Previously, Ware's anhedonia has been channeled into genuinely interesting, provoking tales, as in ACME #19. Here, the setting and the characters are as plain as you can imagine. In fact you don't have to do much imagining at all: they're you, the modern, 2012 you—nailed with uncanny precision. Except it is the dark core of you: every negative, uncomfortable, self-hating moment lined up into a set of panels, with all the stuff that makes life living carefully removed (except when it is put on the butchering table to be mocked).

It's pointless for anyone to say what anyone else *should* be writing about, especially when it is written and visually composed as skillfully as it is here. But whether there's a point to it or not, I can't help saying that Chris Ware seriously needs to find a new set of stories to write.

4 stars because the art deserves every star there is. ( )

Experimental fiction at its best ( )

This was a really cool idea for a book. It is told in pieces sort of comic boom style and you can read the pieces in any order and still understand the story by the time you get to the end. I enjoyed this experience a lot. The only difficult thing was not being able to carry it around to read on the train or elsewhere; I pretty much had to read it at home. I could have grabbed individual pieces to being with me, but I would fear damaging the pages that way. I recommend this for any book lover. ( )

Brilliant. ( )

almost perfect except that some of the writing was teeny-tiny and I couldn't read it easily!! ( )

Stunning. As an artistic and a mental exercise, the book -- a collection of 14 different types of graphic narrative, from long, horizontal stand-alone comic strips to children's books to newspapers to a huge gameboard-like fold-out -- is a marvel of construction. And as a composite narrative (the more accurate but less attractive term for "story cycle" or "novel-in-stories," but never has "composite narrative" so aptly fit a work of fiction), this book is a mind-boggling piece of ingenuity, with each separate item in the book informing and overlapping on each other, and all the orbital stories circling back into the main narrative as well. It doesn't matter which order you read the stories in or how many times you read -- and this will reward re-reading -- the mental exercises and hidden surprises available in this work are exhilarating.

But that's not why I love Chris Ware. I love Chris Ware because he writes so beautifully and honestly about the basic, ordinary human experience that he renders the mundane sublime and heart-shattering. His book Jimmy Corrigan was the first that ever caused me to break open in wracking sobs, and Building Stories did it again. I sat at my kitchen with pieces of the book open before me and I quaked from crying. My toes shook.

And I felt so... known... afterward. It's a kind of compassion that Ware accomplishes in writing these stories. A kind of perfect empathy. You weep because you know that someone out there understands life -- your life -- so well that he has managed to put it into words and images, even if the people look a little different, if the circumstances aren't exactly the same. He knows how you feel or have felt or will feel. And you will love him for it. ( )

WOW. I was a big fan of Ware's earlier book Jimmy Corrigan, but this latest one seems like a leap beyond. It plays a lot more notes than Corrigan's meditation on lonely behaviors, and the playfulness is put to a lot better use. The term "book" is a little loose in this case, since Stories comes as a giant box loaded with everything from small pamphlets to a giant board that folds out as if you were going to play a board game.

These are weird and bad comparisons to use, but the whole thing feels like my favorite part of Infinite Jest: the middle-third where you get 20-30 page jags of some of the best writing you've ever seen, going on for hundreds of pages, seemingly (and pleasurably) without end. Of course, IJ has to come to an ending of sorts, but because Stories is in a dozen different pieces in no particular order, there's this very real feeling that it truly is endless, that you could loop back around to read them in a different order and forever stay in that zone.

The other comparison I would make is to Edward P. Jones' The Known World, which has these wild leaps in time, even in the middle of a sentence. You get the feeling that Jones has imagined his character's entire lives into the future, and that's a similar impression to what Ware brings. Pieces are set as early as the '40s and as late as the modern day, covering different spans of memory and time. One memorable piece—and probably the best to orient yourself by—covers 24 hours and is patterned after the Little Golden Books of my childhood, with the gold spine and hard cover.

Pro-tip: I read from smallest to largest, and left the giant-but-thin (as opposed to giant-but-many-pages) newspaper thing for last. It was a good accidental decision and a great closer for a line of dialogue that's borderline fourth-wall at the end. :) ( )

I wish I'd written this review sooner after finishing the book. Building Stories comes in a box and consists of 14 separate pieces. Some are hard bound books, some are huge newspaper foldouts, and some are just short little strips. There is no specific order to read them in, the pieces just gradually come together.

Some pieces were definitely better than others. The author's ability to capture the inner thoughts of his characters really got to me. The ways heartache, insecurity, and loneliness are depicted in words and illustrations was really powerful.

This has been on my to read list for quite a while. Definitely worth the wait. ( )

In a large box, itself a witty graphic work of art, the reader discovers 14 discrete graphic publications ranging from books to folded “strips”. Everything, as billed, that the reader might need for building stories. This is Chris Ware at his finest, challenging the very form of the graphic novel perhaps to breaking point. There is no set route through the items contained in the box. The reader could choose any order. But of course there is a linear progression for many of the works since they follow a woman from youth to lonely adulthood, marriage, and motherhood. Other items concentrate on Brandford, The Bee. But all of them intersect at points and nothing is entirely isolated. And that might be Chris Ware’s overall theme, since the loneliness and self-loathing that the main character experiences are self-inflicted. Connectedness comes in many forms. And even when we feel most isolated and alone, one step back reveals an intricate pattern of lines linking, waxing and waning perhaps but still connecting, each of us to a host of others. It’s almost as though we can’t help building stories.

Of course this being a Chris Ware work, you also expect punning turns. And sure enough, at least some of the publications focus instead on the building in which the main character lives for a time.That building itself has an architectural and a social history and the story it could tell about life in Chicago over the course of a century would be just as fascinating, perhaps, as any story that focused on one of its inhabitants. But here too connectedness to a wider frame — the social architecture of an American century — draws our building into the lives of its inhabitants.

The tone across these works is nostalgic but melancholic. And although there are bright moments, even hopefulness, there are an equal number of dark moments and despair. What can’t be ignored, however, is the sheer audacity of producing such an artwork in an age of disposable literature and incorporeal “e”-books. Chris Ware and his publishers have re-established the necessity of physical publication and reconfirmed the notion that great literature is a treasure worthy of indefinite shelf life. But you’ll need an awfully big shelf for this box of wonders. Recommended. ( )

Wonderfully drawn and poignant, albeit inconclusive and very depressing. ( )

Inventive story telling. Very heavy material. Good read for something different. ( )

Great read. Really. ( )

Building Stories is a graphic "novel" that arrives in a board game-sized cardboard box and contains 14 different components. These consist of a hard-bound book, small comic strips, newspaper-sized stories, newsletter-like pamphlets, etc. The interlocked stories center around the residents of three flats in an apartment building, hence the double meaning of the title - the stories are about characters in a building, and you work to the build the story as you string the 14 components together.

I'm not 100 percent sure how I feel about the concept of Building Stories being presented in this way. One part of me feels like it was very artistic and creative while another part feels like it was just gimmicky (although I tended to lean toward the former). Practically, it was a bit frustrating to read like this. I kept getting pulled out of the stories throughout the reading process by trying to figure out what part I was meant to read next. By the end, I was both convinced that I had read them in the wrong order and that the gaps in time between and within the separate components made it impossible for them to ever be read entirely chronologically.

Still, the stories were interesting enough that I felt enthralled by this book. I read the entire thing in two sittings (tried very hard for one, but I started late in the evening and was tired), which has become something of a rarity for me these days and thus worth noting. In the apartment building are four residents - the lonely landlady who has seen many people come and go as she approaches the end of her own life, an unhappily married couple who recall their initial thrill at meeting one another, and a depressed young woman who despairs that she will be alone (excepting her cat) forever and tries to rekindle her creative interested in art and writing. The "book" centers largely on the young woman and eventually the apartment building and the other characters drop away. The landlady's story was a sad backdrop for all this and provided a foil to the young woman's ultimate choices, while the married couple's story seemed to end abruptly, leaving the reader wondering about them.

I did very much enjoy getting to know the young woman and her story. In her life (and indeed in the stories of the other characters), I felt like Ware really got to the universal feelings of loneliness and pathos that he attempted in Jimmy Corrigan, which I think failed miserably in that case. The beginning parts of her story were especially riveting as she contemplates her life choices thus far, recalling her first major relationship in college and her nannying job as a postgrad. Later, her stories in suburbia became a little odd, mostly because some elements seemed to come out of nowhere (i.e., her sudden turn to survivalist mode) while important events seemed to be brushed over fairly quickly (SPOILERS For example, her marriage, the birth of her daughter, the death of her father all just seem to happen with very little commentary.end spoilers). I felt like things kind of petered out a little here, and the ending - if you can figure out exactly which page that is - was not satisfying.

The book also contains brief interludes of tales about Branford Bee, who is - you guessed it - a bee. These are funny little asides about this poor clueless bee who keeps repeating the same silly mistakes. Of course, one could read deeper meanings into all this and pull out symbolic messages, but I think the book could have just easily done without these (or less of these) and still been very powerful. Speaking of powerful, one of my favorite parts was a section written in the voice of the apartment building itself and remembering all the tenants over the year. It was very beautifully done and again, really got at more universal themes. A couple of the smaller strips were completely wordless looks at little snippets from the young woman's life and were a bit humorous as such.

In the end, I'm still sort of not sure how I feel about this book. It's certainly unique as a concept and had some interesting characters who spoke to universal questions about the meaning of life and universal emotions such as loneliness and despair while noting the human foible of always thinking the grass is greener on the other side. Still, there were flaws that were glaring enough to hamper my total enjoyment of the book. The very different quality of this "book" also makes it difficult for me to recommend this book as I think it takes a very specific kind of reader to enjoy both the style and themes of this book thoroughly. Nonetheless, I do appreciate Ware's efforts at tackling such a difficult concept and complex story. ( )

4.5 stars. This book was great. 14 pieces, no beginning no end. Just stories and great art. The dialog has some of the most believable and authentic dialog I've read.

For whatever reason I have been unable to focus on my reading and this graphic novel took over two weeks to read. Hopefully finishing this will help get me back on track.
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Highly unique collection of stories presented in various formats (hard back graphic novel, cards, fold-outs, board-game, etc). The stories focus mainly on one woman's life, but we also spend time with the other people who inhabited the same apartment building as her for some time. The reader isn't presented with any instructions about where to start; the best thing is just to dive in anywhere and piece things together in a non-linear fashion. A rich, wistful, unromanticised, warts-and-all slice of life. Just fantastic. ( )

This series of graphic novels/visual art conveys so well a feeling of loneliness. ( )