Like a Detuned Radio

Cascading Books

by Alycia Martin.

Why Finish Books?

by Tim Parks | NYRblog | The New York Review of Books

This got me thinking about narrative engagement by the reader in fiction. Two things come immediately to mind: One is those old Choose Your Own Adventure books I used to love as a kid. The other is Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games trilogy.

I mention The Hunger Games because I loved books one and (especially) two. But Mockingjay just didn’t work for me. I kind of hated how the series ended. Someone I found on Goodreads went ahead and rewrote the ending (WARNING: Hunger Games spoilers abound!) and I found it to be much improved (though still not exactly how I would have like it to end).

But I was thinking, what if Collins had allowed the readers to select how Katniss acted at the end? Choose Your Own Adventure, as far as I recall, was always written in the second person, but I think an interesting idea would be to simply engage the reader in a normal first- or third-person narrative.

It wouldn’t even have to be as pervasive as CYOA: Maybe at a couple of key moments the narrative could say, “If you’d like this character to do A, continue to the next page; if you’d prefer to read about them doing B, skip over to page N.”

Obviously this is something that would be handled better by ebook than a print novel, but the idea that readers, who are being asked to engage with the writer’s stories, should have a voice in how that story unfolds, is one that I think warrants some additional attention.

The Right Cover For "Lolita"

Great article and some great covers, including this one, my favorite. Don’t miss the linked-to discussion of book jacket design on Jacket Mechanical, parts one and two.