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Ryan North

To Be or Not To Be: A Chooseable-Path Adventure Paperback – Illustrated, September 6, 2016

by Ryan North (Author)

485 ratings

Goodreads Choice Award nominee

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From the bestelling author of Romeo and/or Juliet and How to Invent Everything, the greatest work in English literature, now in the greatest format of English literature: a chooseable-path adventure!

When Shakespeare wrote Hamlet he gave the world just one possible storyline, drawn from a constellation of billions of alternate narratives. And now you can correct that horrible mistake! Play as Hamlet and avenge your father's death—with ruthless efficiency this time. Play as Ophelia and change the world with your scientific brilliance. Play as Hamlet's father and die on the first page, then investigate your own murder… as a ghost! Featuring over 100 different endings, each illustrated by today's greatest artists, incredible side quests, fun puzzles, and a book-within-a-book instead of a play-within-a-play, To Be or Not To Be offers up new surprises and secrets every time you read it.

You decide this all sounds extremely excellent, and that you will definitely purchase this book right away. Because as the Bard said: “to be or not to be… that is the adventure.”

...You're almost certain that's how it goes.

To Be or Not To Be originally launched as a record-breaking Kickstarter project. This new, reader-friendly edition features the same text and illustrations as the original version, redesigned to take up half as many pages and weigh a whole pound less.

Print length

368 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Riverhead Books
Publication date

September 6, 2016
Dimensions

6 x 0.9 x 9 inches
ISBN-10

0735212198
ISBN-13

978-0735212190
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“Reference mixed with irreverence—that's what makes To Be or Not to Be so much fun.” —Slate

“An idea that is, by most conventional literary standards, terrible, but pushed so far past terrible that it wraps around like a comet slingshotting around the sun and comes back as utterly brilliant.” —Lev Grossman, Time

Praise for other work by Ryan North:

“Romeo and/or Juliet is written with the finest distilled charm and genuine enthusiasm. Entertaining and extremely satisfying.” —Kate Beaton, author of Hark! A Vagrant and Step Aside, Pops

“Ryan North's The Best of Dinosaur Comics: 2003-2005 A.D. had me howling with laughter and passing the book around to whomever I could lay hands on to point out particularly good strips. Dinosaur Comics is an unlikely gem of a webcomic.” —Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing

"Adventure Time #10 is a spectacular jumping-on point for readers young and old. Even for non-fans, this issue is one of the most captivating comics of the year." —The Onion A.V. Club

"[The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl] was freaking hilarious... it's the closest thing the Marvel universe has to a classic screwball sitcom." —Nerdist

“Machine of Death is a marvelous collection, riddled with intelligence, creative reach, and a frankness that makes the best use of the central gimmick.” —Tasha Robinson, The Onion A.V. Club

“This Is How You Die is a brilliantly addictive book that reads like a series of existential, death-obsessed Twilight Zone episodes. Very highly recommended.” —Seth Grahame-Smith, author of Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

About the Author

Ryan North is a New York Times-bestselling author and cartoonist. His other chooseable-path Shakespeare book is called Romeo and/or Juliet, and you should check that one out too. North is known for his online strip Dinosaur Comics, his critically acclaimed work on Marvel's Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, as well as his Eisner-award winning writing for the Adventure Time comic. He lives in Toronto with his wife Jenn and their dog Noam Chompsky, who is a good boy. Yes he is.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Riverhead Books; Reissue edition (September 6, 2016)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 368 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0735212198
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0735212190
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.3 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 0.9 x 9 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #116,587 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #101 in Parody
- #751 in Fiction Satire
- #1,706 in Humorous Fiction

Customer Reviews:
485 ratings

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Ryan North

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Ryan North is the (New York Times bestselling, Eisner-award winning) creator of Dinosaur Comics, the co-editor of the Machine of Death series, and the author of both "To Be or Not To Be" and "Romeo and/or Juliet": the choose-your-own-path versions of Shakespeare's plays. He also wrote "The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl" for Marvel Comics, who you might know from their movies about an iron man. His non-fiction work includes "How To Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveller" and the upcoming "How to Take Over the World".

He lives in Toronto, Canada with his wife Jenn and his dog Noam Chompsky.

Customer reviews

4.8 out of 5

485 global ratings

5 star		83%
4 star		11%
3 star		4%
2 star		1%
1 star 0% (0%)		0%

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CuteAsADaisy

Daughter Approved!

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 5, 2023

Verified Purchase

So I got this for Christmas for my 15 year old daughter who loves the choose your own adventure style books... there just aren't a lot of them for the older/more advanced reader. I kept seeing her re-reading or better probably trying different routes of the story while she was off over Christmas break. She loves it! Now I just need to find more like it. :/

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Eli

To Buy or not to Buy? BUY

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 19, 2013

Verified Purchase

I was taking a Shakespeare class in college, and I heard about this book on the Colbert Report, how it used to be on Kickstarter. And so I looked it up, because I love bringing in outside material to my classes, and this was perfect. I told my class about it, and when the book came I brought it to class 10 minutes early every day, and let people check it out, and everyone loved it.
I wrote about it in a post for the class, and that review is given below. I haven't even really gotten to sit down with the book for more than 15 minutes at a time, but I think it is one of the coolest takes on Hamlet I have ever seen.

"To Be Or Not To Be: A Chooseable-Path Adventure" is a choose your own adventure version of Hamlet, and it's fantastic. I haven't gotten to play with it much (so much school work), but what I have been able to go through is pretty darn funny. You can play as either Hamlet, Hamlet Sr, or Ophelia. I've mostly played through as Hamlet Sr, since he has the least to do in the play.

When you play as Hamlet Sr, you die instantly. Go figure. But then you get to choose whether or not to become a ghost. If you become a ghost, you then choose whether or not to search around and listen in to people to find your killer. You read some lady's diary, then talk to her, and find out that your brother killed you. Then you walk across the bottom of the ocean to get to Denmark, and on the way you can decide to give up your quest for revenge to go hunting through shipwrecks and become a ghostly marine biologist. It's tons of fun.

I accidentally went to the wrong page, and ended up playing through Ophelia once (I thought I was possessing her... turns out I just made a mistake). One of the paths you can go down with her (and of course, I have no idea how you get here...) you end up playing a trivia game against Fortinbras, and if you win you become the Queen of Denmark.

Now of course, these paths are all separate from the play, but still pretty fun. A quick jump into Hamlet's game shows that it does follow the play (while it's not explicitly stated, there are skulls next to the choices that seem to match with what happens in the play, so I think that's how you follow the play). First you choose whether to ask to go back to school or not, and if you do - you follow the play (dad calls you out). If you don't, he insults you, and leaves you in an empty room (in which you can make decisions that will get you back on track for the play). BUT! If you follow the play all the way through (start to ask Kingy if you can stay, but he calls you out first), you then can choose to "Insult him under your breath by saying you're more than kin (ie You're related more than once now as both father/son and uncle/nephew), but less than kind (ie this relationship you're in is unnatural). In real life people think up zingers like this on the spot all the time, so this totally makes sense" (91). But then "He straight-up ignores your zinger" (317). Then he leaves you, and you end up in a room alone (just like before), and you can choose to kill yourself or not.
And it continues on.

This book is really cool, because it means a couple of awesome things about Shakespeare.
First, it shows that Shakespeare is an adaptable medium. It's not just about reading simply the lines, watching the plays on stage, or watching movie adaptations, but there's room to make it into a narrative. And not just any narrative, but possibly one of the coolest narratives ever - a choose your own adventure book, which gives you the chance to stay totally canon if you so choose.
Second, this book creates another avenue for new audiences. Like Bowlder's "Family" editions, this medium can widen the audience. Not only has the play made fully immersive for readers, since they can literally do whatever they want (provided it's given as a choice with a page number to turn to), but it also uses some key lines and even explains what they mean (I haven't been able to find the "To Be or Not To Be" speech, but I'm sure it's in there somewhere).
And lastly, it's a choose your own adventure book, which I just really think is awesome.

When I find things like this, I am just constantly amazed that Shakespeare has lasted this long. And that he has inspired so many people to write, act, and direct, and that they show that through their personal adaptations of his work.

Helpful

To Read or Not To Read (SPOILER: YES READ IT NOW DO IT!)

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 20, 2013

Verified Purchase

To Be or Not To Be / B00ECJN7T6

How much do I like this book? I will tell you. I like this book so much that even though I participated in the Kickstarter for the book and got a paper copy AND an electronic copy in four different electronic formats, I still bought the Kindle version before writing this review just to make absolutely sure that this book will follow me around on my Kindle account for the rest of my life or until the heat death of the universe (whichever comes first).

If you like the fun and zany humor in Ryan North's "Dinosaur Comics", you will probably love this. It's not just that the idea of a Choose-Your-Own-Path Hamlet re-telling is delightful to me (though it truly is), there's also a wonderful amount of off-the-wall humor that tickles my funny bone to the core. I haven't read through the entire book (I think there are officially 3,001,181,439,094,525 different paths through this amazingly-densely-packed adventure of awesomeness), but I have read through huge chunks of the Ophelia adventure, and I loved every moment of it. Seriously.

The thing I like most about Ryan North's writing style is that he manages to hit that perfect zany-random-Monty-Python style humor that I love while still being progressive and not relying on tired old sexist stereotypes or gross-out humor. Not only does the reader get to go through as Ophelia (AWESOME), but she's also a "capital-s Science" major (Hamlet is, of course, a "capital-u Undeclared", natch), she's taller than Hamlet, and she also (if you take the appropriate path!) manages to invent thermometers and central heating, all without feeling like a gimmick or a 2-dimensional character. It's really amazing to see someone write a humorous strong female character who also comes off as totally real and delightfully relatable. I DEMAND THAT MORE HUMOR AUTHORS DO THIS! But in the meantime, we can all read Ryan North's masterpiece and stew at that jerk William Shakespeare for ripping Ryan off so badly. (Like, seriously, I don't think Shakespeare included the science major stuff at all. Boo.)

Back to the book! The PDF version of this baby has 768 pages, and it's jam-packed with gorgeous full-color illustrations. (These are rendered in black-and-white on my Kindle Paperwhite, but they still look detailed and beautiful.) And speaking of eReaders, this is the cleanest, bestest formatted ebook I have ever owned, bar-none. I was really concerned about how the Kindle would work with a Choose-Your-Own-Path book, but it works even better than paper -- Ryan and his team of professional formatting ninjas have linked everything beautifully in a visual style that works intuitively well, and also the Kindle's "back" button lets you skip back not just to your previous choice but to ALL your previous nested choices, one by one. I can't say how awesome that is when you want to go back to five choices ago to try something else, so instead I will just say that I have now experienced save-scumming while reading a book in order to beat Queen Gertrude in a deadly chess match. Aw yeah.

I don't want to spoil too much of the book, but some passages just beg to be shared. So I will leave you with my favorite-so-far ending just for hilarious audacity, and that would be the ending where I-as-Ophelia convince Hamlet that murdering people for revenge is a vicious cycle and instead we should put Claudius in prison for regicide, which netted me THIS ending: "So! Turns out you scored a possible 100 out of 100 in LEGAL JUSTICE POINTS but unfortunately you only got, like, a 3 in ADVENTURE POINTS. Man, that's baloney! That's what you get for working within the pre-existing legal system instead of employing unpredictable vigilante adventurism, am I right??"

This is an awesome book. If you like Hamlet or humor or zany Choose-Your-Own-Path books or would just like to see an example of a strong female character not only DONE RIGHT but done right in a humorous setting where she is just as awesome and funny and real as all the other characters, then YOU WILL LIKE THIS BOOK. And if you have any reservations about getting a CYOP book on the Kindle, I can officially testify that this book is well-formatted like the crown jewels are shiny, which is to say VERY.

~ Ana Mardoll

36 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

Naomi

This is firmly a mid-teens book.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on May 2, 2021

Verified Purchase

I bought this for someone who doesn't like reading much, but does like acting, so I thought something like this would be perfect. Having read it myself, I was expecting an older target audience. For a quick read it's great, but don't expect this to entertain for longer than an hour or so. And once you've done more than one route it can get dull very quickly - some only last a few pages before it suggests you go back and choose another option again.

Pleut

Everything about this book is perfect!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on May 9, 2015

Verified Purchase

I'm so glad I bought it. It has everything: hilarious prose, quotes from the actual play, parodies of some of its scenes, plot twists, silly rhymes, powerful illustrations, and a spoonful of healthy insanity which - I'm sure - the Bard himself would have much appreciated. Sometimes it is a bit too biased towards some characters, sometimes it is too harsh on others, maybe, but the general idea you get is that of a refreshing and always surprising rewriting of a beloved tale which we often take too seriously due to the themes it revolves around. It is said that parody is not meant to ridicule a work of art, but it is actually a way to honor it, to celebrate it as a masterpiece and to mark its importance in the history of art - literature, in this case. I couldn't agree more. A must-have for every Hamlet (and Shakespeare) enthusiast.

One person found this helpful

AruAxe

Otherwise its an excellent book. Very funny and entertaining

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on January 4, 2018

Verified Purchase

This yellow covered version does not have the full colour oictures of the original hence a loss of star. Otherwise its an excellent book. Very funny and entertaining!

One person found this helpful

The Literate Chimp

Genius

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on January 19, 2014

Verified Purchase

Ryan North needs to dedicate himself to doing this full time. Actually, no he doesn't. Life without dinosaur comics wouldn't be worth living. Wasn't that Aristotle? I think it was.

2 people found this helpful

Jess R

She loves it!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on December 26, 2021

Verified Purchase

This was a gift for my friend, she absolutely loves it, and despite dying almost instantly, is having a blast reading it.

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