Do you remember how awesome Choose Your Own Adventure books are? They were my favorite type of book when I was in elementary school. The library in my elementary school had a program called R.I.F., which stood for Reading Is Fundamental. We all got to pick out a book for free from the books laid out on specific tables. After walking through the books I would always approach the librarian and ask if any Choose Your Own Adventure books were available. The answer was always no. So I ended up getting a Power Rangers puzzle book. I thought Tommy, the Red Ranger, was the coolest. I was him for Halloween once.
I tried to check out every CYOA book I could from the library when I was little. Sometimes I would get really depressed while reading them because I could never win. I would always seem to find the horrible, grisly deaths.
I was thinking about CYOA books because I saw THIS flowchart that someone made of all the paths available in one of the books he read. Isn't that just awesome? I heard that one book, Inside UFO 54-40 didn't even have a happy ending that you could reach. The whole plot of the story is to find the Utopian civilization but you can only find it if you flip through the pages and just happen to find the happy ending. It claims to be very symbolic.
If you're interested, HERE is a list of the Top 20 Classic CYOA books. The BYU Library doesn't have any of them, so I entered a suggest-a-book form to the Juvenile Librarian. I recommended that we buy the first 33 books of the CYOA series. It would only cost about $180, which isn't bad considering that you're getting the coolest books on the planet. Other books that I submitted through suggest-a-book where ordered (the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series and all of Atul Gawande's books--can you believe they didn't have any of his stuff?) so I have high hopes.
It kind of makes me want to write my own Choose Your Own Adventure book...
2 comments:
Now that you are a published author, you ought to branch out and write your own Choose Your Own Adventure book. I remember how much you loved those books. I think we have a few downstairs still.
On another note, when the surgeon came out after Dad's surgery to talk to me, I happened to be reading Atul Gawande's latest book, The Checklist Manifesto, and he said he had just received that book as a gift. We talked about his other books for a minute before I got the report on Dad. Kind of cool. Discussing a surgeon's book with a surgeon.
Maybe Nathan can choose whether or not he gets scurvy.
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