Ryan North

Yes, here it is. William Shakespeare's greatest work in the form it was always meant to take: a Choose Your Own Adventure story! Er, sorry, make that a "chooseable-path" story. We don't want to get sued, after all.

But whatever you call it, it offers you the opportunity to choose your own Hamletty adventure. You can play as Hamlet, Ophelia, or (briefly) the king's ghost, and make decisions about where the story goes. Have you always wanted to force Hamlet to just get on with killing Claudius show more already? No problem! Turn to page 195! Then again, depending on what kinds of actions you take, he might end up taking up a life of piracy instead. Or falling out of a window. There are a lot of endings involving Hamlet falling out of a window. Also a surprising number in which Ophelia just straight-up murders everybody.

It's all highly entertaining, filled with silly humor, little games-within-games, and colorful full-page illustrations (one for each possible ending). It also pokes a lot of fun at the original, but as someone who genuinely loves the play, I found it all mostly pretty hilarious. Although not nearly as hilarious as the moment when I found myself trying to dispose of Polonius's body by eating it. Does it make me a bad person if that made me laugh so hard I started to have trouble breathing?

You can also play this in computer game form, too, by the way, although that format does rob you of the fun of flipping pages back and forth and marking all the choices you want to revisit with a small blizzard of post-it notes. Although it probably does make it easier to read with a cat on your lap and a mug of coffee in one hand. That was a bit of a struggle for me, I'll admit. show less

I first decided to read this book because I saw the following excerpt on Tumblr (mind your business; I like that digital hellscape):

"The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals-- and yet, to me, what is the quintessence of dust? Man delights not me—"
You break off as Guildenstern interrupts you.
"Gayyyyyy," he says.
"I said man delights NOT me, idiot," you say. "Nor woman neither, though you seem to think---"
This time you're interrupted by Rosencrantz.
"Asexuallllll," he says.

I have show more read worse books for substantially worse reasons.

Fortunately, this book is absolutely delightful. As someone who loves a good choose-your-own-adventure and is enough of a literary nerd to appreciate elaborate Shakespeare jokes, I was exactly the target audience. The book manages to be simultaneously affectionate, irreverent, clever, and completely ridiculous.

More importantly, it understands something that many people seem to forget about Shakespeare. The modern literary canon has wrapped him in an aura of intimidating seriousness, but he himself was writing for entertainment; these plays are not sacred literary relics. They are full of puns, innuendo, ridiculous misunderstandings, and the occasional joke that would have fit comfortably into a pub after several ales. Anyone insisting Shakespeare is exclusively highbrow has clearly not spent enough time with his oeuvre. Or his corpus. (Fancy words... neither signifies intellect.) Ryan North clearly understands this and embraces it wholeheartedly.. Shakesy-P, you would have loved this...

As a result, the book feels less like a parody of Shakespeare than a continuation of that spirit—playful, clever, occasionally absurd, and deeply invested in entertaining its audience.

Not every reader will enjoy the humour or the choose-your-own-adventure format. Much of the appeal depends on whether you enjoy wandering down bizarre narrative dead ends simply to see what happens. I very much do. The chooseable-path format works remarkably well here, creating dozens of opportunities for chaos while still demonstrating a genuine affection for the source material. The result feels less like parody and more like an enthusiastic conversation with the original play.

I also maintain that this book displays a better understanding of Ophelia than certain pop-cultural reinterpretations I could mention.....

This will absolutely be joining my personal library. One path through this book is nowhere near enough.

5 stars. Be not afraid. Embrace whimsy. show less

Pow pow pow! Squirrel Girl vs her greatest opponent HERSELF! I really like how as opposed to the old golden age of comics being all about defeating baddies through muscles and patriotism (from what I can tell with my very limited knowledge of the more popular superheros), Squirrel Girl is also a product of its more current time, and not necessarily just technologically. Instead of immediately knocking out all the baddies, she shows how empathy and critical thinking can be used to defuse a show more situation. Just warms my heart to read and to think of the young kids perhaps subconsciously absorbing its lessons. show less

idw’s most recent star trek miniseries was a three-issue arc based in the continuity of the lower decks animated series. the fact that it wasn’t given a separate title like the various discovery and picard miniseries seems to suggest that they're not planning on visiting this series all that often, but hopefully i’m wrong in that assumption.

in the main plot, our main characters accidentally create a sentient holodeck character in the form of count dracula, a la moriarty in tng’s show more “elementary, dear data” and “ship in a bottle,” but like way funnier because... it’s fucking dracula? anyway this plot is pretty straightforward and gets resolved pretty easily, which is a shame because i kind of wanted to see that dungeon dracky was so excited about.

on the whole i really enjoyed this comic. it felt really in keeping with the tone of the show, and i really enjoyed a lot of the humor in it to the point of actually occasionally needing to stop and read parts of it out loud to my mates whenever they were in the room with me while i was reading it. in addition to the show’s usual brand of humor, they also took advantage of the format by adding little metatextual footnotes from the perspective of characters or an omniscient narrator. i was skeptical of these at first, but a few of them actually made me laugh out loud, and upon reflection it’s nice that they clearly did put some thought into how to adapt the series to another medium.

again this wasn’t mindblowing or anything, but i’m guessing they more or less made it for people who love the show and would appreciate something to whet their appetite during the long wait between seasons, and this certainly works well enough as far as that goes. show less