Choose Your Own Adventure books are one of my strongest book memories from primary school (along with Coles Funny Picture Books, Scholastic Book Clubs, and the unfortunately titled Digit Dick books that my Year 2 teacher used to read us). Discovering an as-yet unread novel with the red Choose Your Own Adventure bubble at the top of the white cover was always cause for celebration and delight.
It was exciting to watch my own children discover Choose Your Own Adventure stories for themselves. We have borrowed them regularly from our local library and I’ve picked up a few here and there at second hand stores.
The books have also been republished over the past 10 years, generally with revised text, by Scholastic with new covers (black and darker colours now with more prominent titles, but the red bubble remains). I haven’t read any of the newer versions in detail, so I’m not sure how extensive the revisions are. No doubt it has been important to add mobile phones and computers smaller than a cupboard to keep the attention of modern children.
My youngest, Mr8, has just discovered CYOA books and is quite impressed with them. He has started with a 1983 edition of The Race Forever by R A Montgomery and I can only imagine what kind of automotive technical wizardry the book deals with as the adventure follows the First African Dual Road Race Rally. I’ve noticed him back-tracking to find a more satisfactory storyline, although I’ve yet to see him bookmarking pages with his fingers as I used to do, trying to keep track of the story until I didn’t have enough fingers free to actually hold the book.
A book is touted as being the most amazing thing to hit the bookstores since… well, since the last really amazing book. Bookstore shelves groan under the weight of multiple copies and less desirable tomes are banished to dimly lit corners and hard to reach upper shelves where the dust bunnies and spiders lurk. Not [...]
On Friday I took my daughter to Sydney for the day to visit a friend’s art exhibition. We travelled by train, which meant that I had around 5 hours of travel time to fill.
Obviously, I needed to pack in a book. It had to be interesting enough to distract me from [...]
Driving to school to pick my children up this afternoon, Michael Penn’s ‘No Myth’ came on the radio. This song always takes me back to the year after I finished high school. My best friend and I loved the song and hearing it reminds me of listening to it and other favourites while [...]
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