What if you could change everything?

That was question posed to me when I picked up The Cave of Time, the first installment in the groundbreaking Choose-Your-Own-Adventure series of books created by Edward Packard back in the early 1980s.

If you're unfamiliar with this particular book, you're certainly familiar with the concept: You read for a bit and then are faced with a choice. If you choose one thing, you turn to one page. If you choose another, you go somewhere else in the book. It was for me—and I think for a lot of kids, even still today—a revelation: you held what felt like infinite possibilities in your hand. Your fate was yours to choose, but every choice had unseen risks. It felt like real power.

The premise of The Cave of Time is remarkably simple: You wander into a cave and you have to find your way out. Literally, that's the entire setup. By the second page you're already making choices.

In The Cave of Time, nearly every page has a choice, jumping you dozens of pages between paragraphs. Almost nothing overlaps, there are no paths that bring you back to earlier choices. Sometimes it seems like every choice is a bad one, other times you go on a run of making good ones. So often you don't know which way a choice will lead. In that way it's very much like life.

Continue reading →