Read March

Spiegelman's father in Auschwitz, Jews as mice and Nazis as cats; the only comic with a Pulitzer.

Marjane Satrapi grows up through the Iranian revolution, in black and white.

Alison Bechdel's father, a closeted funeral director, and her own coming out; the comic that became a musical.

A first love and a fundamentalist childhood in a Wisconsin winter; Craig Thompson's 600 pages.

A masked anarchist against a fascist Britain of the 1990s; the Guy Fawkes mask comes from here.

Solzhenitsyn's literary investigation of the camps from 227 witnesses; the abridged edition is enough.

Mandela's autobiography from the Transkei to Robben Island to the presidency.

From Detroit Red to Mecca, told to Alex Haley in the year before his assassination.