Ready Player One - Ernest Cline (?????)
Book 44/52
I don’t think I have binged a book for 14 hours straight since Harry Potter. That is exactly what this book ended up being; a binge read. We had the day off yesterday and I started the book at about 7am and didn’t put it down until I finished it at around 10pm (except to take a shower and gobble down meals). Fast paced, action packed and absolute heaven if you’re a mega-nerd for pop-culture from the 80s.
The plot is set in a dystopian future in 2045 where a massive “video game” has provided the impoverished civilization with an escape from reality and the internet is nearly synonymous with this virtual world. Haptics, computer vision and AI reign supreme and everyone lives online hardly leaving their “homes” for months on end since the world’s natural resources are all but exhausted. When the creator of the game and this virtual OASIS dies, he leaves behind a quest for people to find a hidden easter egg in the game that will grant the winner hundreds of billions of dollars in assets as well as control of the largest and most powerful company in the world.
The story revolves around a protagonist who through the book comes of age and grows into a hero from the underdog, a few supporting characters with very quirky personality traits and character development, an antagonist who is actually not purely one dimensional and a (collection of) world(s) that never ceases to amaze the reader with overdoses of nostalgia. The creator of the game was a massive nerd from the 1980s and in order to win the game, players need to spend years, even decades really researching and studying comic books, movies, video games, arcade games, rock bands and more from that time period. The result is countless references to Star Wars, Star Trek, Pink Floyd, Def Leppard, Blade Runner, Pac Man and on and on the list goes.
If you’re a nerd who enjoys this genre, I would strongly recommend this book. Just remember to prep your food and water bottles ahead of time because you will not be putting this book down once you pick it up.
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