All the Way Through

When I began reading House of Danger, I was eager to choose how I wanted the story to go, however, after dying five minutes in I found myself frustrated with the process. In order to “fix” the problem I tried again, but died even quicker. After repeating this a number of times, I realized that my slightly OCD nature was kicking in, and I ended up reading all of the possible stories. This book was written to allow the readers to choose their own adventure, so why did I feel the need to read all of the stories in order to feel like I captured what the author was intending?

As we discussed in class the audience of this book is children, and as you read that becomes very clear. As a child reading this story, I would imagine being able to choose from the two option at each fork in the road is very empowering. Knowing this, I find it interesting and almost saddening that as a teenager or even an adult we loose that feeling of power and instead feel the need to read the novel all the way through, as we have grown up doing. If I had stopped after reading the original story I picked I would have felt like I was missing out on the purpose of the novel. Instead of appreciating that I picked one of the novel’s twenty different ending, I felt a habitual need to read them all so that I could say I read the book. This shows how not yet having the mentality of always reading a book from start to finish, top to bottom, and all the way through allows children to appreciate novels for their content. While reading the many different ending I knew that I had no genuine purpose for my actions, however, nonetheless, I continued until I had read them all. Why is it that we feel like we are “breaking the rules” if we read a story in a non-typical way? It is the case that we, as superiors to children, have something to learn from them?