Big Nate

About the Big Nate series

Nate Wright is an unapologetically confident sixth-grader at P.S. 38 who's certain he's destined for greatness -- as an athlete, a comic artist, a ladies' man, anything -- despite a steady stream of detentions, humiliations, and disasters that suggest otherwise. Spun off from Lincoln Peirce's long-running newspaper comic strip, the eight illustrated Big Nate novels follow Nate through school-year schemes: starting a band, running for class president, feuding with his nemesis Gina, and constantly sparring with his deadpan best friends Francis and Teddy.

Told half in prose and half in Nate's own comic-strip doodles (much like his more famous cousin-in-format, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, which it actually preceded as a strip by decades), the series leans on Nate's oversized self-belief for its comedy -- he's never in on the joke, which is exactly what makes him funny. It's a gentle, low-stakes read: no villains, no real danger, just the everyday indignities and small triumphs of middle school, delivered with a cartoonist's sense of comic timing.

Big Nate is a dependable pick for fans of illustrated-novel humor who've already worked through Wimpy Kid and want more of the same energy with a different (equally self-absorbed) narrator.

How to read this series

Read the eight novels in publication order starting with Big Nate: In a Class by Himself (2010). Each book is a mostly self-contained round of school-year scheming, so the order isn't essential to following the plot, but character relationships and running jokes build naturally across the series.

Lincoln Peirce also publishes a much larger, separate line of Big Nate comic-strip collection books (reprinting his newspaper strip), which is a different reading experience -- short daily gags rather than novel-length stories -- and can be picked up independently in any order once you've enjoyed the novels.