I was scrolling through TweetDeck on my phone last night when I saw a wildly enthusiastic tweet from Jenn Northington, Events Manager for Word in Brooklyn. It was about a book I love and a little dialogue ensued:
I read Aseterios Polyp earlier this year as part of a crazy jag of graphic novel reading for the LA Times Book Prizes. Here's what I had to say about it then (please excuse the use of the royal "we" in the passage, it's an LAist thing):
"So - to the point: we're trying not to get band wagon-y here, but have you seen Asterios Polyp? It's insanely fantastic. It's gorgeous and the story of Polyp, celebrated architect re-examining his life and the many twists and turns that brought him to his present state, is enthralling. It is also dense. This is a big novel of big ideas and once we finished it, we wandered around in a fugue for days. It took Mazzucchelli ten years to write this and that's how it feels. Asterios Polyp has been hailed as a book that will redefine the future of the graphic novel and it may well do that. For this massive attempt alone, it is oh so worthy of the LA Times Book Prize."
So, yeah, I think it's pretty fantastic. The LA Times thought so too, because Asterios Polyp won the first-ever LA Times Book Award for Graphic Novels. And I think it's clear from the @Storify tweet-stream above that today is, in fact, Asterios Polyp day. Celebrate accordingly.
Some ways you might celebrate accordingly include: racing out to your nearest independent bookstore to buy a copy or several, tweeting/blogging about your love for the book, or simply picking the book up again to marvel at how incredible it is and say a little thank you to David Mazzucchelli for creating such a masterpiece and to Pantheon for publishing this work.
