Hi. My name's Dave. When I was a kid, I read a handful of CYOA books and loved them. Then they disappeared from my life. My mother thought they weren't proper reading. I moved on to other things.
Years later, older and more stubborn, I've decided to go back and read them again. Not just the ones I remembered, but all of them. Fighting Fantasy, Lone Wolf, Sorcery!, Choose Your Own Adventure, the obscure ones, the modern ones, the Twine stuff that lives online. This blog is the record of that.
I'm not an expert and I'm not approaching this as one. I'm a reader who finds this format genuinely compelling and wants to write about it honestly: what works, what doesn't, what holds up after forty years and what doesn't.
The plan is to work through as much of the catalogue as I can, with essays and features in between when something is worth saying that doesn't fit a review.
I'm not going to pretend these books are all good. Some of them are extraordinary. Some are mediocre. Some are actively unfair in ways that would be unacceptable today. I'll say all of that, because the point isn't just nostalgia: it's the honest experience of reading.
If you have a recommendation, a correction, a dispute about whether Deathtrap Dungeon is the best or worst book in the Fighting Fantasy series, or just want to say hello, you can reach me here.
No spam. Just a short note when something new goes up: roughly once or twice a month.