[If anyone was hoping for another Cowboy Bebop post, don't worry - I haven't abandoned the series. But Choose Your Own Adventure came up on one of the podcasts a little while back, and I wanted to get this finished while it was still on my mind.]

In a few hundred years, when people get around to writing a really definitive history of avant-garde literature in the 20th century, I hope they pay enough attention to Choose Your Own Adventure.

I’m not even slightly kidding.  The Choose Your Own Adventure books (and the other gamebook series – Time Machine, Tunnels and Trolls, Fighting Fantasy, and so on) are a far more successful challenge to our received notions of what “reading” is about than any modernist novel I’ve encountered.

And everyone read Choose Your Own Adventure back in the day.  Two hundred and fifty million copies sold between 1979 and 1998, according to Wikipedia, and in 38 languages.  Astonishing.  I have no idea how to figure out how many copies of Finnegan’s Wake were sold during the same period, but I’m guessing less.  And while I hear you saying already that selling a lot of copies doesn’t actually make a literary work successful, it does matter in this case.  A challenge to standard narrative that doesn’t reach a mass audience is not really a challenge at all.  It doesn’t mean the niche stuff isn’t good or important, but to be a really viable alternative it needs to be, uh, viable.

Anyway, the CYOA books would have been pretty radical even if they hadn’t been lucrative.  The earliest gamebooks came out of the French experimental literature collective Oulipo:  in 1967, Raymond Queneau produced a short story in this format which you can still read here, assuming you speak French.  And the idea was in the air earlier than that… “One beginning and one ending for a book was a thing I did not agree with,” Flann O’Brien writes in At Swim-Two-Birds, which sure enough has three beginnings and three endings, if you’re not too careful about how you define the concept.  But I’m not here to try to rescue the artistic purity of reader-driven-narrative from servitude in the brothels of capitalism by pointing out that “serious” intellectuals did it first.  I’m here to talk about the CYOA books themselves, which deserve to be remembered for their own merits.  (But before we leave the topic of brothels, let me just point out that there are apparently a LOT of “adult” CYOA titles out there.  I knew about the one I linked to from working in a bookstore, but while googling it I found out that there are, like, way, waaaaay more than I expected.  And while I don’t get the feeling that all of these are actually pornographic, they’re all selling themselves on a winking hint of sexuality coupled with a healthy (unhealthy?) ladle of nostalgia, sort of like a “Sexy Smurfette” Halloween costume.  Gross.  But then, the cover art on Escape From Fire Island is just perfect.  And I bet no other book has ever had, or ever will have, the Amazon tags “Champagne Toast,” “The Meat Rack,” “lifeguard station,” “zombie epidemic,” and “The Golden Girls,” making Escape From Fire Island another one for the ‘ol ‘Unsurpassed and Unsurpassable’ file.

So, the radical things about Choose Your Own Adventure books.  (Or at least apparently radical.  We’ll get back to that.)

• First of all, although each book has a solitary beginning, they do have multiple endings, and in a way that surpasses anything Flann O’Brian came up with.  For all that At Swim-Two-Birds claims to have multiple endings, they appear in a fixed order, and even a perverse reader who purposely tackles them out of order will read one of them last, making that one the “real” ending.  CYOA books, on the other hand, may have dozens of endings spaced throughout the book, and each is an actual, definitive, end.  (Or not.  More on that later.)
• Second, to increase universal appeal, the protagonist (that is, “You”) has no gender, no race, no religion, no sexual orientation (21st century erotic repackagings of the concept notwithstanding).  No political opinions, no particular skill set… a total blank slate.  I do seem to recall that the protagonist was usually described as a child (the books being marketed to children), but that’s about it.  Eat your heart out, The Man Without Qualities.
• Third, the reader drives the action:  as the title of the series suggests, you get to choose how the story develops.  Just like you can choose whether or not to read the rest of this post.

Up 2: Next Year in Jerusalem

“He caught him up, and, without wing
Of hippogrif, bore through the air sublime,
Over the wilderness and o’er the plain,
Till underneath them fair Jerusalem,
The Holy City, lifted high her towers . . .

. . . There, on the highest pinnacle, he set
The Son of God.”

– John Milton, Paradise Regained, Book IV

The kindness of the world toward your existence turns out to be an illusion of youth, and all love dies. Man must keep his faith and promises, even as he ages toward death — find a place to stand firm, even as he falls.

Pixar’s Up and John Milton’s great poems Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained are about more than what they have in common. A laundry list of their similarities would hardly be interesting (especially if you haven’t read the poems). But they meet at a critical and compelling place in what I like to call the Artistic Project.

This balloon is about to get heavy, so if at any point you need a little extra lift, bookmark this.

Now, let us go, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow, to find our solitary way —

[Guest writer Trevor Siegler offers a personal appreciation of literary giant John Updike, who died Tuesday. —Ed.]

John Updike passed away yesterday, leaving a huge gap in the literary genre known as the “grocery store short story.” As far as I know, his “A&P” is the only memorable short story set within the confines of a supermarket. Twain could have had a lost chapter in “Huck Finn” where Piggly Wiggly crops up at an important plot point, but Updike reigns supreme in the depiction of just how much it sucks to work at a food-dispensing hellhole.

For a long time, I blamed Mr. Updike for my decision to enter that seedy world of climate-controlled milk shelves and artificially-colored fruit displays. On the surface, my crippling student loan debt and the fact that my grandpa could help me get the job with a minimum of ass-kissing the boss on my behalf were more important reasons to seek employment with a certain grocery chain located primarily in the Southeast (Winn-Dixie). But I’m a voracious reader, and Mr. Updike’s story went a long way towards selling me on the notion that I could be a stud in the bagboy corps of my local store.

Let me take you back to a more innocent time, a more refined time, a time in history when nothing seemed like it would ever change from the peace and prosperity of the recent past: the summer of 1998, particularly memorable for me because of two factors.

A while ago, I wrote a review of the book Jack Torrance writes during The Shining. (It’s funny because the novel is just the sentence “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” repeated over and over again.) Now Overthinking It reader Phil Buehler has kicked things up a notch by actually producing the book.

And not only did he write 80 pages of All Work and No Play Makes Jack a Dull Boy, he made sure each page is formatted in a different delightfully insane way. And he’s blurbed OTI on the back cover. I am disproportionally proud of this.

Sadly, it’s too late to get a copy for Christmas, but I guarantee this will start conversations on the subway. Nice work, Phil.

All Work and No Play… [Blurb]

...or are you just happy to see me?

“I like the name of Dick,” said the young lady, with charming frankness.

Without being able to tell why, Dick felt rather glad she did.

I have just finished All Work and No Play Makes Jack a Dull Boy, the debut novel by the late Jack Torrance, and I do not hesitate to call it the greatest English work of the past 50 years. It is nothing short of a complete rethinking of what a novel can and should be.

At the risk of spoiling the book, let me repeat what you may well have heard from the tabloid press and late-night comedians. All Work consists of a single sentence, repeated over and over for hundreds of pages. Some will dismiss it as simplistic; that’s like dismissing a Pollack canvas as mere splatters of paint.

It’s true that, taken on its own, All Work is plotless. But like the best of Beckett, the lack of forward momentum is precisely the point. If it’s nearly impossible to read, let us take a moment to consider how difficult it must have been to write. One is forced to consider the author, heroically pitting himself against the Sisyphusean sentence. It’s that metatextual struggle of Man vs. Typewriter that gives this book its spellbinding power.

Sadly, Mr. Torrance’s legacy has been tarnished by his widow. The couple and their young son spent the last winter of his life as caretakers of a remote mountain resort, where he put his masterpiece to paper. Mrs. Torrance has claimed that he tried to kill her and the boy in a fit of madness. Personally, I believe she is the real murderer. Mr. Torrance was found frozen to death in a hedge maze, days after his wife and son abandoned him. I find it likely that this betrayal drove him, if not to suicide, then at least to ignore his own safety during a treacherous Colorado snowstorm.

Thankfully, Mr. Torrance was able to complete All Work before his untimely death. (Although truthfully, the book’s unconventional nature makes it difficult to say whether it’s “complete” or not.) For most of his adult life, Torrance has worked as a teacher, his genius going to waste. Call it poetic justice that the resort at which he became an author is called the “Overlook Hotel.”

All Work out-moderns modernism. It surpasses post-modernism. I can only refer to it as “most-modernism.” I could easily write thousands of words on Mr. Torrance’s accomplishment, but I’ll heed the book’s advice and end my work here. Suffice to say, All Work and No Play Makes Jack A Dull Boy is a shining achievement.

What is Cthulhu, really? Why are the Great Old Ones here on Earth, and what are their plans?

These are some of the great mysteries that have been haunting us since H.P. Lovecraft first introduced his Cthulhu mythos in the 1920s.

But those questions are dumb. The real question is: how the hell are you supposed to pronounce his freakin’ name?

Yes, yes. I know you all want to say, “It’s kuh-THOO-loo, obviously.”

Yes. Obviously.

But why? Tradition? Because the author said so? ‘Cause that’s how they say it in the role-playing game, Call of Cthulhu(tm)?

No. I disagree. You heard it here first, folks. “Cthulhu” should–nay, MUST–be pronounced “THOO-loo.”

Before you start yelling, hear me out, below the magic fold…

The Harvard Classics Project is a very Overthinking It-type enterprise, in that it combines high culture and pop culture.

On the high culture side is The Harvard Classics. In the first decade of the 20^th century, Harvard President Charles Eliot claimed that a five-foot shelf of books could provide “a good substitute for a liberal education in youth to anyone who would read them with devotion, even if he could spare but fifteen minutes a day for reading.” (Which leads me to wonder, was President Eliot implying four years of Harvard was a pointless waste of time and money?)