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YOFR : Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

(Last week I fell behind, and missed posting this on Friday. And then things got even busier. But I’m back on track now, so this week, you get two blog posts!)


This month my Year of Fun Reading Challenge required me to read a book recommended by someone with great taste.

I don’t know about you, but I have a book guru in my life. Someone who I look to for book recommendations, because I know she shares the same love of reading and appreciation of a good book that I do. And we also are similar in that we read widely in book genres. She might have a few more romance-y type books than I do, and I might stray a little further down the science fiction/fantasy path than she will, but generally we both like to read widely, and have pretty high standards when it comes to quality of writing and plot development.

So when I was looking for a book to fulfill this challenge, I decided to read a book that my book guru recommended, that being Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline (2011). This book has been out for a few years, and has been getting rave reviews from day one.  However, I was a little leery of it because it features a teen mastermind who basically saves the world, and I don’t particularly like Young Adult fiction, nor storylines about teen geniuses that save the world (Wesley Crusher anyone? Ugh.)*.

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So I had been avoiding this book, until my book guru told me she had read it and enjoyed it, and recommended that I give it a go.

What makes a good book, anyway? For me it’s a mix of great characters, a compelling story and high quality of writing. You can play around on the sliding scale of good to bad on any one of these qualities but essentially I need a book to have some of all of them for me to truly enjoy it.

Ready Player One hits the mark on all of them, I am thankful to say. My book guru was right. I did enjoy it!

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There are a lot of dystopian future novels out there, and Ready Player One fits firmly in that camp. A lot of those YA dystopian novels also feature some kind of love triangle (i.e. Hunger Games). Although there is a romance in this book, it’s not a love triangle, thankfully.

The story is set in a near-future America (2044), where due to global warming, an energy crisis, and economic collapse,  life is pretty dire indeed. The only relief from the bleakness of life is the virtual reality platform called OASIS where players can immerse themselves in another world (or worlds, technically) using specialized goggles, haptic gloves (to feel things) and body suits.

On his death, James Halliday, the creator of OASIS, reveals that he has hidden a very special Easter egg inside of OASIS, which, if found, will enable the winner to inherit his  fortune and ownership of OASIS. An Easter egg, if you don’t know, is a special hidden bonus in video games that gamers can find, which may or may not have anything to do with the game itself.  This sets off a global egg hunt (inside the virtual realities of OASIS), but the clues are so tricky enthusiasm wanes quickly and eventually, five years after the announcement, no one has deciphered the first clue and the only ones left searching for the egg are the die-hard dedicated gamers.

The protagonist, Wade Watts, who has given his avatar in the game the name of Parzival, is a young teen who lives in the “stacks”, basically a trailer home in which the trailers are stacked on top of each other. He is your typical geek, who spends far more time in the virtual world of OASIS than in the real world. He spends most of his time trying to figure out the first clue to the first stage of the hunt and in a eureka moment figures out that the first clue will lead him to a place on the virtual planet that his (virtual) school is on.

When he finds it, the announcement goes out on the game scoreboard, and the interest in the hunt is revived world-wide, as people realize that the announcement of the Easter egg was not just a joke that the OASIS founder, James Halliday, had perpetuated on the world. Parzival is immediately famous, and the eyes of the world are on him as he begins to work out the next clue.

Wade (Parzival) has two good friends in OASIS: Art3mis (a girl he has a crush on), and Aesch (pronounced like the letter “h”). Wade has never met these people in real life, he only knows them through their avatars in OASIS. He helps both of them get the first clue as well, and the three of them begin the task of trying to figure out the rest of the clues and get the prize. They, along with a couple of others from japan (Daito and Shoto) become the top five “gunters” (egg-hunters).

Complicating the search is the main antagonist, Nolan Sorrento, the head of Innovative Online Services (IOI), the worldwide Internet provider, who wants to find the egg in order to gain control of OASIS and monetize it. The IOI players are well-funded and have all the resources that the gunters could only dream of.

This is a well-written novel, with likeable, realistic characters. The plot is exciting and interesting. It was a great deal of fun to be immersed in this Easter egg hunt along with Parzival. Sorrento and IOI are ruthless, even resorting to murder to advance their progress in the game. OASIS itself is a fascinating place, with lots of worlds to explore and puzzles to solve.

The plot builds to a satisfying and exciting climax, allowing our hero to grow along the way and face down his nemesis in a way that fits seamlessly into the plot.

The best part of Ready Player One, however, is the fact that the whole novel is immersed in the pop culture of the 1980s. Halliday, the creator of OASIS, was a 1980s aficionado, so the clues to the hunt and the various puzzles and challenges the gunters have to solve, are all related to the 1980s somehow, including games of PacMan, nods to Star Wars, Dungeons and Dragons, and movies such as Blade Runner and War Games, and even Monty Python and the Holy Grail (yessssss!).

I graduated high school in 1980, so all of these references made the book that much more fun. I suspect they are part of the reason why this book has become so popular. It has even caught the eye of filmmaker Steven Spielberg, whose film adaptation of the novel is coming out in 2018. Which is fantastic. This is one of those books that is just begging to be made into a movie, and to have Spielberg at the helm is perfect for it.

Ready Player One is a good book, meeting or exceeding all of my requirements for book excellence.

Thanks, Book Guru. I owe you one!

My rating: 5 stars. Loved it.


*Fun Fact: Will Wheaton, the actor who played Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation, is the narrator for the audiobook of Ready Player One.