Book-A-Day 2016 #6: Baking With Kafka by Tom Gauld

Is Tom Gauld our most erudite cartoonist? From the evidence of his work, he well could be -- there's a parade of authors both classic (Shakespeare, Austen) and genre (Ballard, Gaiman) and modern literary (Franzen, Mantel), and a dazzling awareness of tropes and ideas and genre furniture in his work, and it's hard to think of any other cartoonist who has worked so much with this material.

Naysayers might point out that all of this material originally appeared in the book section of the British newspaper The Guardian, and so one could thus expect that bookishness would be baked into the premise. That's true, but, still Teh Grauniad asked Gauld to be their cartoonist in the first place for a reason, and it's not because of his amazing facility at drawing likenesses of famous writers.

(Just in case: Gauld does not have an amazing facility for drawing likenesses of famous writers. At least, I've never seen such from him, and his minimalist style would tend to go in the opposite direction. But there I go explaining the jokes again.)

Baking With Kafka is a collection of Guardian cartoons. Some of them may have appeared elsewhere, before or instead of or also, because this book, like so many others, doesn't explain where it's contents appeared previously. (Cue my standard if-I-ruled-the-world complaint.) They are all about books, in some way or another, or, at least, about the kinds of things that bookish people care about.

It contains such awesome works as "The Four Undramatic Plot Structures" and "My Library" (with books color-coded as to whether or not they have or will be read), "The Nine Archetypal Heroines" and "How to Submit Your Spy Novel for Publication," "Jonathan Franzen Says No" and "Niccolo Machiavelli's Plans for the Summer." All of those are a single page in size; no one must keep a thing in memory from page to page -- except, perhaps, a sense of object permanence and the ability to read the English language.

Some people will hate this book. Perhaps they hate it because they hate literature, or books in general. Perhaps they hate it because Gauld's style is too simple and illustrative for them. Perhaps they hate it because they are hateful people full of hate who live only to hate. There are many reasons, none of them, I insist, good ones.

All of the smart readers will love it. And you consider yourself a smart reader, don't you? There you go.

(For those unsure as to how smart they are: the cartoons here are much like those in You're All Just Jealous of My Jetpack. You might also want to consider Gauld's recent full-length graphic novel Mooncop.)