Chapter 87: Jason Shiga on perilous puzzles and precarious paths

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I grew up reading the Choose Your Own Adventure series but it had been years — decades even! — since I’d read a game book. Then I stumbled upon the fascinating book Meanwhile by Jason Shiga and was completely sucked back into this incredible genre.

When you open Meanwhile you are a young boy on his way to an ice-cream shop. If you get vanilla? You go home. The end! But if you get chocolate? You plunge into thousands of endlessly splintering storylines. You meet a mad scientist. You jump in a time travel machine. The fate of the world is suddenly at stake!

I have no idea how someone could imagine a book this complex and yet so elegant to experience. I was sucked in. So I reach out to Jason Shiga and was grateful that he agreed to come on 3 Books.

Jason is a Japanese-American cartoonist who incorporates puzzles, mysteries and unconventional — very unconventional — narrative techniques into his work. He grew up in California and studied Pure Mathematics at the University of Berkeley.

Jason has been the ‘Maze Specialist’ for McSweeney’s Quarterly (founded by Dave Eggers, our guest in Chapter 81!), written for Nickelodeon, SpongeBob SquarePants, and much more. He’s also won a number of awards including the Eisner and the Ignatz and has written a number of additional books, including Book Hunter and Demon.

What are we going to talk about on this show? Well there is a lot to learn including: what is a Japanese chicken commune? How does children’s literature address taboos we have around death? How can a love of puzzles inform creativity? What are moral dilemmas and what can we learn from them? What is the ‘classic trolley problem’? What is the relationship between books and video games? What is the state of the game book industry? How do we think about playing with a book? And, of course, what are Jason Shiga’s three most formative books?

Let’s turn the page into Chapter 87 now …