The Prebble adventure: Reading I’ve Been Thinking, a quarter century on Essay For all its faults, writes Danyl Mclauchlan (whose new book Tranquillity and Ruin is itself published this week), the Labour-turned-ACT politician’s 1996 books speaks for something that now seems almost old-fashioned: a group of true believers that had a vision of how the world works. Read Richard Prebble’s reflections on I’ve Been Thinking, 25 years on, here They were called “Choose Your Own Adventures”, and they were a publishing craze back in the 1980s. They were novels – mostly for kids and teens – broken up into sections. The reader got to choose what actions the second-person protagonist took then flipped forwards or backwards to the appropriate section to learn the consequences of their decision. “Turn to page 15 to fight the monster, or page 100 to run away.” A lot of these books were fantasy or sci-fi stories and they functioned as a gateway drug channeling a generation of young nerds into computer games and roleplaying.