Whether this is even a book or not is debatable; it takes the form of a box containing pamphlets, chapbooks, comic books, hardcover books, a folding screen and something resembling a newspaper. Its brilliance, however, is not debatable. On those various paper media, Chris Ware depicts with deep precision and compassion the lonely, difficult, obliquely intersecting lives of the inhabitants of a Chicago apartment building in gorgeously stylized, frozen panels that evoke the emergency instructions in an airplane seat pocket. The components of Building Stories can be read and combined and recombined in any order, producing chance connections and beautiful resonances — very much the way life itself does.