Thursday, July 15, 2021

Book Note: To Be or Not To Be

North, Ryan. To Be or Not To Be. N.p.: Breadpig, 2013.

I could have sworn I wrote about this book—one that started life as a Kickstarter project—much nearer its publication date, but my memory seems to be faulty.

Here we go, then!

This is a fascinating "Choose Your Own Adventure" version of Hamlet—with a ton of fascinating twists. To start, you choose whether you'd like to read it / play it as Hamlet, as Ophelia, or as Hamlet's Father's Ghost. From there, there must be hundreds of ways to go.

I find it to be a great book to noodle around on while waiting for appointments, commuting, or relaxing. You're never committing to reading all 700+ pages—just to following an interesting path.

Let me show you one possible path, starting with choosing Hamlet.






Note that it doesn't stop even after that last choice! Inventively, the storyline continues.

Grab a copy, relax, and make your way through Hamlet.

Click below to purchase the book from amazon.com
(and to support Bardfilm as you do so).

No comments:

Bardfilm is normally written as one word, though it can also be found under a search for "Bard Film Blog." Bardfilm is a Shakespeare blog (admittedly, one of many Shakespeare blogs), and it is dedicated to commentary on films (Shakespeare movies, The Shakespeare Movie, Shakespeare on television, Shakespeare at the cinema), plays, and other matter related to Shakespeare (allusions to Shakespeare in pop culture, quotes from Shakespeare in popular culture, quotations that come from Shakespeare, et cetera).

Unless otherwise indicated, quotations from Shakespeare's works are from the following edition:
Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.
All material original to this blog is copyrighted: Copyright 2008-2039 (and into perpetuity thereafter) by Keith Jones.

The very instant that I saw you did / My heart fly to your service; there resides, / To make me slave to it; and, for your sake, / Am I this patient [b]log-man.

—The Tempest