Building stories (2012)

Chris Ware's Building Stories is a box rather than a book: fourteen printed pieces, from cloth-bound hardcovers to newspapers, broadsheets and flip books, that you can read in any order. It took a decade to finish and came out from Pantheon in 2012, taking four Eisners the following year, including Best Graphic Album: New. The lives inside one Chicago building are small and often lonely, so pick it for the experience of piecing a life together yourself, not for momentum. It set a high-water mark for what a graphic novel could be as an object.