Cats, good books, AI, and religious walking in the city of Sofia
An adventure gamebook in the shape of a comic book. Best of both worlds 🙂 It has 5 sub-stories, each with 100-ish episodes.
September starts strong with a 5/5 book that I would not dare to review. It’s Deadpool. I hate superheroes but Deadpool hates them too, so I think it’s fine.
Roger Wilco is a Bulgarian fantasy gamebook writer who published exactly two books sometime around 1998. He was inspired by the more famous writer Michael Mindcrime, who he met on a tram. However, he started with the other book and ended with this one, and there’s no trace of other creations 26 years later. A Bulgarian version of Harper Lee.
I received a beautiful and well-preserved copy of True Macic by mail and it invited me to read it.
The book is short and readable, about 260 episodes. A junior mage and his anti-mage friend go after a magic book and a disk. The issue is that as it seems, there are lots of books of various colors, and the disks are likely CD-ROMs. They will find thousands. Judging by the book + CD-ROM-combo, I think the mission was to find one of those programming books from the 1990s with a CD glued inside.
The world is a post-apocalyptic fantasy where the current civilization has been transformed by a nuclear (or asteroid) holocaust. It remains unclear which one. The cities are in a mad-max-style chaos, and magicians roam around and wreak havoc. There are some safe spaces here and there, maintained by magic (and CD-ROMs).
I found a path to the end but the book likely keeps other mysteries hidden, including flying carpets. I might give it another chance.
I catch myself valuing literature that’s not serious over serious but shallow. I’d rather read Matthew Reilly than Mark Manson. However, what do we say about literature that’s purposefully not serious, shallow, and cringe to extreme levels? The book in the photo above is a form of absurd comedy. It’s unlikely that it ever gets translated, or even published in enough copies so that anyone other than gamebook collectors reads it. But it exists and I think it’s nice that such things can happen. I enjoyed it for what it is.
So, the book is about an illegal vegan in a world where eating meat is required by law. He’s born with the mission to make the evil tyrant of the world eat veggies. He’ll meet cartoonish characters along the way and be tempted to eat ingredients that may contain animal products. It didn’t become clear to me if the author was mocking vegans or if he was vegan himself and wrote this piece as an act of defiance. Perhaps both? Who knows.
The book is unavailable in any online store, has no ISBN, and doesn’t exist on Goodreads.
The prettiest cover from the first 6 books I purchased during the book fair is already on the “read” bookshelf. It’s the second book I read this year that doesn’t have a Goodreads entry. If any of my readers here is a Goodreads Librarian, please add it – I posted two requests on Goodreads for book additions.
From what I see, the gamebook writers in some countries that aren’t Bulgaria, seem to prefer publishing their works on Google Drive as a PDF and just let them be available to anyone for free. This one is published in English here.
The photo of the cover is from an angle on purpose – to see all the shiny letters. Then each page has decoration, and the illustrations are stunning. I’m not sure why and how that happened but this is a first edition and a translation at the same time.
The story is Gibson-style cyberpunk, with some references to Gibson and other gamebooks. The gameplay felt linear – you must go through most episodes for a successful read. I’d consider it easy. The writing is good, and the story is engaging.
4/5 for the book, 5+/5 for the editing/illustration/publishing. It’s a piece of art.
I read a gamebook that’s not on Goodreads. It is, however, available to download in English for free here, most likely submitted by the author. From what I understand, the only paper edition is in Bulgarian.
It’s beautifully made in Bulgarian, with original illustrations by famous illustrators. Dimo and Ivanchev are credited.
The story is about Middle-Earth-type dwarves who are running away from an invading army. You’ll have to navigate through a brief maze of episodes and find a few keywords, one of which is particularly difficult. There’s no way to read that from the first time. It’s only 100 episodes but the way it’s made, the success sequence is specific and hard to find. I didn’t attempt to fight the battles and only tried to find the codes, which was difficult enough.
Overall, a good book, about 4/5. The artwork, translation, and editing of the Bulgarian edition is 5/5.
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