By Rebeca Dunn-Krahn
One day in 2023, soon after leaving my job in the tech industry, I saw an Instagram post by author and professor Lynda Barry about her monthly ritual of spending an entire day in bed reading comic books and drinking beer. It was such a sweet idea. It sounded innocent, but also somehow subversive. I wanted to try it. My life had been hectic for 20 years but now I was free from my nine to five and my youngest child was turning 18. The timing was good to try something kooky and indulgent.
I created a recurring event in my Google calendar for one year and warned my spouse, “I’m gonna do something weird and I don’t want to be hassled about it.” The beer part was too ambitious for a beginner, and at odds with my resolution to drink less, so I omitted it.
My older son Sage, who has a degree in visual storytelling, offered to help curate my monthly comics selections. Everything was in place for the 12-month experiment.
I like the reading scenes in Wim Wenders’ film Perfect Days, where the main character lies on his tatami mat reading by the light of a friendly Pixarish lamp. Since I sleep on a Japanese-style roll-out bed on top of a tatami mat for the sake of my back, these scenes feel familiar.
It was winter and the weather was lousy. Normal people were at school and work. I could hear cars swishing down the wet road and my spouse taking Zoom calls down the hall. My younger son was frying eggs for breakfast. And here I was, living my best life away from responsibilities and devices, lying in bed reading the memoir The Secret to Super Human Strength by Alison Bechdel in January, the historical novel Agnes, Murderess by Sarah Leavitt in February, and the wrist-strengthening, 920-page psychological masterpiece The Third Person by Emma Grove in March. Partway through March’s session, I met my spouse in the kitchen during a water break, and he asked how it was going. “I think this is the best day of my life,” I said. The experiment was off to a good start.
“Now I should read something by a man,” I told Sage at the beginning of April. “I want to include a diversity of voices in my selections.” He directed me to Asterios Polyp—not only by a man, David Mazzuchelli, but also about a man—and to the university library near my house. “They have a good assortment,” he said, “and you can keep them basically forever.”
The university’s 1.5 million-item collection is mostly bound in navy, wine, and brown buckram, creating a drab, Soviet-era mood in the stacks. Against this backdrop, the colorful spines of the graphic novel and comics section glow like Vegas lights in the desert. Sequential art stories from all over the world are available for a generous 90-day loan period, in the original languages and in translation. On my first visit, I lingered for half an hour, feeling I was sneaking in some undeserved pleasure. I hadn’t been a student here for 20 years, it was the middle of a weekday, and I had things to do, but instead I slowly scanned psychedelic spines in a remote corner of the nearly-empty campus library. If I had a heart attack, how long would it take someone to find me? My obit would read, “She died doing what she loved.”
I had just returned from Japan, where I saw people pay by the hour to read manga in special reading rooms in the public baths and in huge velvet beds in a cat cafe. I had some negative preconceptions about manga, but seeing these readers made me curious. “It can’t all be porn and Astro Boy,” I thought. Recognizing the name Yoshihiro Tatsumi, I slid the three-inch thick A Drifting Life out of the stack and paged through it. No excessive exclamation marks, no upskirt shots. I hauled it home.
The clear Spring days made me feel I should be doing something else, something productive, something outdoors. I’d been strict about committing the whole day to reading for the first three months, but now I started to soften the rules. After finishing Asterios Polyp on a sunny April morning, I went for a long walk —“Gotta get those steps in!” said a voice in my head—before returning to bed in the afternoon for A Drifting Life, a memoir of a great manga artist, which kept me up late. “Lying in bed all day” had become “lying in bed most of the day”.
“I didn’t know you would consider manga,” said Sage when we debriefed about A Drifting Life.
“I didn’t think I would like it,” I said, “but now I know I do. I didn’t realize there was such a breadth of content. I thought it was just slapstick and superheroes.”
He recommended I dedicate the next four months to the eight-volume life of Buddha by godfather of manga, Osamu Tezuka. I agreed.
The designated May morning arrived, but before cracking open volume one, I put in a load of laundry. I wasn’t “doing laundry” per se, the laundry was just getting done in the background while I was fully committed to the life of Buddha. I changed it over between volume one and volume two, and made burritos for dinner. After dinner I folded. The infractions were piling up.
It turns out it’s difficult to be visibly unproductive for one day per month, even if only my family would ever me see me doing it. I thought my husband was the main source of judgment about productivity, but my therapist suggested it goes back further, to my childhood, where “lazing about” was frowned on, and “vegetating” only allowed after exhausting oneself for the benefit of others. My parents did this every day in their jobs in public education. Resting before you were “absolutely dead on your feet” was unacceptable, and showed poor character.
Sloth is a deadly sin, but it’s also my favorite animal.
“How’s Buddha?” Sage asked.
“So good. Amazing. A beautiful story, funny also, historical, philosophical, everything. If only Tezuka wasn’t obsessed with boobs, it would be an ideal reading experience.”
“Yeah, there’s that,” Sage agreed.
“All his other quirks I love. How he inserts himself in the story, puts pop culture references into the mouths of characters who are supposed to be living in 500 BC, randomly transforms someone into a pig for just one panel. Great stuff. But the gratuitous boobs! They’re so jarring. Why couldn’t he just go to therapy instead of doing this to us? Did he think no women would ever read his work?”
A librocubicularist is someone who reads books in bed. My preferred reading costume is this leopard-print onesie.
Buddha should have taken four sessions, but I finished early, leaving room for something new for the final lie-in of the summer: My Favorite Thing is Monsters, Book 2. Along with thousands of fans of Emil Ferris’s first volume, I’d waited impatiently for this sequel, and reading it felt like entering another universe. Ferris uses a ballpoint pen and a wild mix of drawing styles, including faithful replications of master works the characters visit at the Chicago Institute of Art.
It was a hot August day and the house was quiet. My husband and younger son were on a hiking trip and I was alone with the cats. I was experiencing loneliness for the first time in my life. My Favorite Thing Is Monsters put me in a grey, wistful, spooky mood, totally inappropriate for a sunny summer day.
There’s danger in reading top-quality literature unsupervised. I left my cool, dark bedroom and walked slowly to the kitchen, my mind still lingering in the story. Did I dare take a walk outside? Or would traffickers and gangsters be waiting for me?
This kind of total surrender to a fictive universe doesn’t happen when I read in short bouts, interrupted by the dings of my phone or the end of my bus journey. I thought of the term SSR, Sustained Silent Reading, from Beverley Cleary’s Ramona books, and how the “sustained” part was key to the experience, and how rarely I’ve read that way in my adult life. Comics are an especially immersive form, and the experience feels closer to watching a movie than reading non-graphical narrative prose.
In September, I returned to historical fiction, with Gene Luen Yang’s two volume epic, Boxers and Saints, about the Boxer rebellion of 1899, an attempt to repel foreign interests from northern China. Written and drawn by Yan and colored by Lark Pien, this story was heartbreaking and felt sadder than Buddha because it happened more recently, just 125 instead of 2500 years ago.
In October, I asked my comics curator about manga by women, and he directed me to “shōjo manga,” or “girl comics,” specifically the reigning queen of the genre, Moto Hagio. Drunken Dream and Other Stories is a collection of short narratives that feel like half-remembered fever dreams. The flowy drawing style and otherwordly mood were perfect for the spooky season.
By this point, I was carrying tall stacks of comics home from the library every month and reading them outside of my designated comics-reading time. It continued to be difficult to schedule and then follow through on the monthly full-day bacchanalia of reading, and I decided the experiment would end after twelve months. I’d enjoyed myself, learned a lot of history, and converted to a manga-lover, but I couldn’t keep going with the ritual. There were too many voices in my head saying, “This is silly. You don’t have time for this.”
All year, war and genocide flared and smouldered and flared again in Ukraine, Sudan, Palestine, and elsewhere. On the morning of my November read-a-thon, Lebanon and Israel had reached an uneasy ceasefire, but both sides accused each other of violations. In Gaza, Israel was blocking aid and nine members of a family had died after attacks in the Nu-seirat refugee camp. I was in bed reading Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City by Guy Delisle, about the First Gaza War of 2008-2009, and it felt like a fugue. Delisle could have been writing about what was happening in 2024. I didn’t know then that the worst was still to come, that the blockade would last for many months.
December arrived with its frenetic holiday activity, and I didn’t start reading until after lunch on the 30th. The final book of the year was The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace & Babbage, and it held me in its papery clutches all afternoon, evening, and into the night, but I still didn’t finish. It was the footnotes that did it. Author Sydney Padua conducted a Grand Canyon’s worth of research on computer science, math, engineering, history and literature to tell the story of the first computer and the people who created it, and I didn’t skip a single note, sub-note, asterisk or appendix of her epic work. She applied the same rigor to her storytelling, art, and humor and the result is magic.
On January 1st I was still working my way through the appendices of Thrilling Adventures, with great pleasure, and flipflopping on my decision to end the experiment. I realized there were other voices I could choose to listen to, like my sister, who likes to say, “I’m a human being, not a human doing,” or the cartwheeling character in Ariel Gore’s coloring book Home is Where the Freaks Are, who recommends, “Make yourself useless to capitalism!” Could I use these mantras to de-program myself from the idea that it’s bad to lay in bed reading all day?
On January 2nd I finally finished the book. I closed it and gave it a hug. I felt like a kid again. I couldn’t even remember where I’d put my phone.
Rebeca Dunn-Krahn is a writer and flamenco artist living on Vancouver Island. Her essays have appeared in Geez, Mountain Bluebird, and True Story magazines and in anthologies by zines & things, World Traveler press, Little Fiction/Big Truths and, Literary Kitchen. Her satire has appeared on Frazzled and Jane Austen’s Wastebasket. Rebeca is an alumna of the year-long Mavens of Mythmaking certificate programme at Ariel Gore’s School for Wayward Writers. Learn more at rebecadk.com.
Collage art of woman in bed by Lynda Barry.
