Choose Your Own Adventure

You are holding a book in which you are the hero. Not a hero — you, by name given or not, dropped into a cave that bends time, the deck of a diving bell, a jungle at dusk. The story is told to "you," in the second person, and it stops every few pages to ask what you do next. Turn to page 44 to follow the tunnel. Turn to page 55 to go back for the lantern. One path finds the lost city. Another ends, mid-sentence, with you very sorry you turned back for the lantern. This is the shelf that taught a generation that a book could argue with them. Edward Packard invented the trick; he and R. A. Montgomery built it into an empire under Bantam, and a crowd of hands — Richard Brightfield, Jay Leibold, Louise Munro Foley — sent "you" down into shipwrecks, spaceships, and Himalayan snow. There is no single world here and no continuity: each volume resets you to page one, a fresh nobody with a fresh doom. The rooms you hold branch into their own moods — the sci-fi runs of Space Hawks, the deliberate scares of Choose Your Own Nightmare, the short bright adventures written for younger readers, the fatter Super Adventure volumes with more forks to lose yourself in. What makes it yours is the danger of choosing wrongly and the freedom to choose again — endings that praise you, strand you, or kill you outright, thirty-odd to a book, all of them earned by your own hand. There is no order to obey; any spine will do. But if you want the first door, open The Cave of Time, where it all began. Turn the page.