When I was young, I had a preference for the choose your own adventure series. There were others, like the Time Machine, and Car Wars, but I always remember this time as the time of books that were innovative. Books that tried to be more than just stories, but more engaging somehow to the younger reader than a static path through the same book. There was choose your own adventure and the variants, but then there was the books with actual computer programs in them that you had to debug or hack in order to get to a positive outcome. I still have fond memories of those.
But the Choose Your Own Adventure books were the first.
Of course, I ended up just flipping through them each time and then reading all the grisly ways your character (and in effect you) would end up dead.
With nearly all the endings, you end up dead, or in some horrible situation. They were remarkably grisly for their age bracket. I wonder if my parents would have bought so many for me if they knew how often I would end up washed away by a flash flood, eaten by sharks or woken up by the boa constrictor around my neck.