Choose

Carey Wallace's Choose is a choose-your-own-adventure for grown-ups. But it's a fluid, fast-paced CYOA, and the structure of it ends up generating not just a hundred dynamic short stories, but also an almost-coherent version of New York. If you treat the book the same way you read CYOAs as a kid - jumping into the middle and working forwards and backwards to unravel alternate tracks - a consistent vision of the city emerges. Wallace's city is so full of moody misadventure that you'd almost take it for Murakami's Tokyo, which is a high complement in my book.

It's sadly out of print, but we'll see if we can convince Ms. Wallace to publish it in another form.

Noted on March 15, 2011