At the Comic-Con this year, had the pleasure of randomly stumbling across the Igloo Tornado booth. Last year, I bought the awesome Tom Neely book, The Blot, and have enjoyed some great mailing list fodder as a result.

This year, I was excited to discover that Jason Shiga was perched at the booth. Shiga’s Bookhunter is easily one of the funniest, most entertaining books I’ve read. A detective action thriller, Bookhunter follows a determined agent on the lookout for library related chicanery.

Based on this book alone, I pretty much bought the other Shiga titles on the table. Including this:

It wasn’t until looking through the book, later, that I realized that this is easily a contender in my newly created genre: Books So Ridiculously Awesome You Don’t Even Know What To Do With Them (BSRAYDEKWTDWT). Really, look at this book. It looks awesome and you won’t know how to read it (the book will in fact chastise you if you program it incorrectly).

See, the book is divided into two smaller sections. As a result, the book is a programmable comic story run by a “paper engine.” The directions are intuitive and fun. The result is a surprisingly difficult set of puzzle adventures.

I went back the next day to buy as many copies of Hello World as I could afford for friends. Unfortunately, that only meant two more. Self published, printed, and bound, Hello World can’t be the easiest book to produce on a large scale. However, considering the amount of complex thought that has gone into revving up this engine, I’d hope more people will get to see this at some point.

Well done, Shiga.