Choose Your Own Adventure books, by R.A. Montgomery, Edward Packard, and many others!

This is another series of “oldies-but-goodies” from my own childhood!  The Choose Your Own Adventure books feature awesome stories, and they’re written in a way that places the reader in the middle of the action like no other book could.  There were dozens of books in the original series, and I guarantee that any child of the 1980s has read at least one of them.  After a huge demand from readers, the series was continued into the 1990s and re-launched again in 2005.  With that many adventures to choose from and multiple endings for each one, the number of different stories you can read is literally endless!

Here’s how these books work:  as you start reading, you’re introduced as the main character and given a brief introduction to the setting and the plot.  After maybe 1 or 2 pages, you’ll be asked to make a decision about what you’d like to do next.  You’re then given 2 or 3 actions to choose from, each with a corresponding page number.  Once you’ve made your choice, you flip ahead and read about where your decisions have taken you!  It’s a completely different format from reading straight through a book, and what’s really cool is that as you move forward, your choices can lead to some drastically different conclusions.  Fair warning, though:  not all of the endings are happy ones!

The Choose Your Own Adventure books feature amazing illustrations and the “chapters” are amazingly short, sometimes less than a single page.  This makes them the perfect choice for reluctant readers or any kids who’d be more likely to pick up a video game controller before they pick up a book.  If you’re like me, you’ll find yourself reading the same book over and over, trying to discover all the possible endings.  One thing’s for sure, though:  once you pick up your first Choose Your Own Adventure book, you won’t be putting it down anytime soon!