Choose Your Own Misery: The Holidays, by Mike MacDonald and Jilly Gagnon

Written by Onion alums Mike MacDonald and Jilly Gagnon, Choose Your Own Misery: The Holidays is an R-rated choose-your-own-adventure story that takes you through countless holiday misadventures, ranging from moderately gloomy to gross as hell. The set-up is simple: your family is out of town, and your relationship is too new for a shared Christmas, so you and a Jewish friend buy tickets for a tropical vacation. Sadly, a massive storm blows in, and your plan for a sunny, relaxing break goes terribly wrong (in any number of ways).

Choose Your Own Misery: The Holidays is tailor-made for reading out loud during a long road-trip home from college. Alternatively, it would make a fine drinking game. It's not really the kind of book you sit down and read, but it's good for dozens of 10 to 15-minute-long breaks from the various holiday-related family/travel/financial freakouts most of us are currently experiencing. Expect this sucker to turn up at loads of white-elephant gift exchanges this year, and fight to hang onto it—it's considerably more fun than yet another $5 Starbucks gift card.

Review based on publisher-provided copy.