If, as any sensible person would do, you decide not to dive to the bottom of a lake that houses a monster, you end up devoured by the Loch Ness monster. If you decide to seek it out and dive to the bottom of the lake (because it might lead you back to your time), you end up safe and sound back where you began at Snake Canyon. In The Cave of Time, for instance, you’re stuck as a fisherman in medieval times, when you hear about a cave in the bottom of a lake where a monster lives. (The three keys: Have the right state of mind, think clearly, and keep decisions under surveillance.) But in the actual books, it’s almost impossible to know, before you turn the page, what is a wise decision and what isn’t. One of the original authors of the Choose Your Own Adventure books, Edward Packard, ended up writing a book for adults called All It Takes: The 3 Keys to Making Wise Decisions and Not Making Stupid Ones. You could awake to a boa constrictor wrapped around your neck, or sink with the Titanic. In The Cave of Time, a misstep can transport you to the middle of a war, with bombs exploding all around. In House of Danger, you can be devoured by a pack of snarling chimpanzees. In the book Inside UFO 54-40, for example, the wrong choice leads you to solitary confinement on a spaceship until you become disoriented by the “incredible loneliness of outer space” and lose “all will to survive” ( The End). The Choose Your Own Adventure books terrified me because they made it so clear that choices are either right or wrong. There’s even a blog, You Chose Wrong, documenting all the grisly ways these books end. Choose incorrectly, and you turn the page, and there they are, beneath a block of text, the bone-shaking words The End. In fact, just about every judgment you make can lead to death or ruin. But perhaps because they were written in the 1970s and 1980s, the Choose Your Own Adventure books have no shortage of bad endings. In The Cave of Time, you can end up on a train with Abe Lincoln.) Turning to page 10 could lead you to another dimension entirely, or maybe you could end up stuck as a fisherman in the year 980.Ĭhoose Your Own Adventure ostensibly asks the reader to take stock of her surroundings and make the best-informed choices possible. Turning to page 8 may take you to another cave or a medieval kingdom or may lead you to meet Abe Lincoln. Or do you stay where you are for the night? Then turn to page 10.
Do you try to go back home? If so, turn to page 8. In the very first Choose Your Own Adventure, for example, The Cave of Time, You are exploring a cave in Snake Canyon when You suddenly realize the sun has set and you are lost.
Told in the second person, the books make the reader the main character and ask You to dictate the path the story takes.
#The cave of time series#
Published from 1979 to 1998, Choose Your Own Adventure is a series of children’s books, many of which are still circulating around libraries and used bookstores everywhere. I also attribute a very small part of these problems to Choose Your Own Adventure.
I can attribute my decision problems to many things: anxiety, my type A-wanting-to-get-everything-right-ism, a journalistic tendency to know all the info before I chose anything.
0 kommentar(er)
