2013 book 217

Ryan North's To Be or Not to Be
A choose-your-own-adventure version of Hamlet is clearly the best idea ever, which is why this raised over half a million dollars on Kickstarter. And yes, I'm counting it toward my book totals, b/c it's over 700 pages long (some are illustrations, but still) and it took me more than a few hours to go through. I'm like 97% sure I got to every ending thanks to a system involving lots of page-corner-turning and several bookmarks! And it was so worth it--this was REALLY well done. I have never chuckled so much at Hamlet! Granted, I have never actually chuckled at Hamlet before, to my knowledge, but I certainly appreciated it much more this time around. I also liked how North editorialized about some of the choices that stick to the text, particularly the ones involving Ophelia. But there's also ghost time travel and a lot of swordfighting pirates, for those who don't want to be judged for making sexist choices as Hamlet would. It's all very clever with a GREAT execution. Plus illustrations by all the awesome indie comics people of the day! How can this not get an A?