Okay, the first question to ask is what actually is it?
In 2011 the author and illustrator Maira Kalman was invited by New York's Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum to curate an exhibit based on the museum's collection. Kalman, whom you might know from the odd New Yorker cover, rummaged around in the museum's archives for a year or thereabouts choosing pieces based on, she says, "one thing only - a gasp of delight".
This book is a kind of exhibition catalogue then. In it you'll find pictures - some photographs, some Kalman's painted recreations - of the items that delighted her. Shoes, a spoon, chairs, fabric, books, stitching, a teapot, a goblet.
You will also learn about the things that Kalman collects herself - buttons, books, postcards, photographs of dancers and dandies and dogs, as well as "pants of famous dead conductors. Well, one pair of pants of one dead conductor" (Arturo Toscanini if you must know). And you will read quotes from Darwin and Proust and Lewis Carroll.
So it's both an exhibition catalogue and a list. It's also a memoir. Kalman tells us about her mother's childhood in Belarus and the time she almost drowned. She tells us about her father falling out of a window in Tel Aviv before Kalman was even born (and because she's an artist that story makes her think of Joseph Beuys who also once fell to earth when his plane was shot down during the Second World War). She tells us about her aunt Shoshana who would keep fish in the bathtub "waiting for Friday night dinner".
What is this then? You might call it an illustrated book. But given that the words and the pictures have equal weight I'm happy to call it a graphic memoir. Because ultimately it's a book about time, about the things we lose and the things we keep to remind us of the past - our past and others. And it's one of my favourite books of this year.
"People lived. People died. Everything is part of everything."
The end.
My Favourite Things, by Maira Kalman is published by Harper Design, priced £20
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