Bob Powers (4) (1973–)

Remember those Choose Your Own Adventure books you read when you were a kid? You know, the ones where half of the endings were "...and you die of thirst in the desert and no one ever finds your bones" (I'm actually not making that one up. What the hell kind of psycho wrote these things, I'd like to know)? Well, this is a Choose Your Own Adventure for adults. Here, you're a down-and-out alcoholic office temp who wakes up next to a dead body and doesn't remember a thing. Believe it or not, show more things go downhill from there. (Sure, you say it sounds implausible, but this kind of stuff happened to me all the time when I was in my 20s.)

Sounds kind of obvious, I guess, but this book really was pretty funny and didn't get tedious. (It's also a pretty sly satire on the awful American health care system.) It does suffer from the same problems as any other Choose Your Own Adventure -- namely, after a while you keep turning the pages back and forth because you keep running into the same ending and it gets annoying. Still, the book is pretty inventive, and it's a lot more entertaining than watching episodes of Intervention.

Ok, that didn't come out quite the way I meant. Just go buy it, you'll see what I mean. show less

Sasha leant me this book, and explained that it would make me a far worse person than I actually am.

This collection of short stories, if you will, indeed had that effect. More often than not I found myself laughing harder than I'd care to admit at truly horrifying prospects. In particular "Some of the Cats Day" struck me as hilarious, along with "Cruelty Day."

Sasha, you like really, really, really strange books.

I'm very grateful for that.

I went into it with too high of expectations. If I just wanted to be amused, I might have liked it better. I would have liked it more if the different choices navigated you around the same story, not took you to different explanations to what had already happened.