The Visual Within Me

This week in class we started reading the graphic novel "Maus". This novel really gave me a different viewpoint on the idea of meaning. In my lifetime, I was not a big fan of books and only tended to read them when required. This book, though, has opened up a new realm of the creativity inside of me. I had never seen a book so intriguing with pictures like a super hero comic but with an actual and meaningful story behind it. The little details all around the pages could make me flip through this book for hours and not get bored. It gave me an idea not only associated with books, but everyday life in general. It shows that everything that you despise will have some sort of attractiveness that will pull you in and change the way you think. For example, when I first started playing basketball, I hated it. I was too short and everybody around me was better than I was. I used this as motivation to practice and practice and soon nobody could compete with me. I turned from hating basketball to loving it just because I found something that could change my viewpoint. The same thing happened to me with books this week, where this type of genre made me change my opinion. Just reading Maus, some of the lines contained so much imagery that I felt like I was reading a normal book, but there were pictures which gave me a better understanding. For example, the line that said "It was terrible cold that Autumn. All over Europe it was so freezing that birds fell from the trees" (Spiegelman 53) which showed me the reference they made visually in the picture and not just in words. I think this idea of the graphic novel is a great way for all ages to view interesting pictures while reading meaningful stories instead of one or the other.