I have an 80’s music playlist on Spotify. It is named “the greatest decade known to mankind”. This may have greatly influenced my review of Ready Player One. (And just like the book, my playlist is not religiously limited to the 80’s). I loved Ready Player One. I held it close, I stroked it, I stayed up all night to…read it. It is my soulmate, my dream, my future, my everything.
Ahem. Sorry. It’s been awhile since I was truly excited about a book. So exciting that reading was so fun I could hardly catch my breath and I had to stop myself because my eyes were reading to fast. I literally LOL’ed. Seriously, I had my doubts, but this book is amazeballs.
Its set in the dystopian future of 2044. The world is falling apart in an energy crisis and people are living in apaling conditions. They escape into a virtual reality universe called OASIS. When the creater of OASIS, James Halliday, dies, he leaves behind a quest: whoever unravels the riddles left behind inherits the entire OASIS.
Wade Watts is poor, living in a container stack, which is exactly what it sounds like. He’s immersed himself in the 80’s pop culture as Halliday was obsessed with it. The level of obsession is a delight to every nerd who creams at obscure pop culture references and weird connections across genres. Basically, if you’re a nerd, if you’ve ever memorized random facts because you like it, you will probably like this.
However the references are an important part of the book. I enjoyed the book very very much, but since I was born in the 80’s and not young there, I lived the 80’s through my parents and so maybe some references slipped by me. But the mere craftmanship was enough to set my geek flame a-blazing. It even did pretty well on the gender front, which most dystopian sci-fi usually…doesn’t.
Ready Player one was obviously written just for me, but if you can tell me who the creators of Ms. Pac-man were and its original release date, I might just let you borrow it.
This was my favorite book that I read last year. I loved it so much that I bought a copy for my husband to read since he was sick and tired of hearing me say how awesome it was. I was little in the 80’s so some of the references went over my head but I still loved it! I’m glad Cline wrote this book just for you :)
On your eventual re-read of this beautiful modern day classic, you should try checking out the audiobook. It’s narrated by Wil Wheaton, and it’s delightful.
I wholeheartedly second Narfna on this one!
I’ll cosign “popcorn book” as a thing. My book moods fluctuate wildly–I want Scary! Deep! Epic! Schmaltzy!–so I can totally think of times that I’ve longed for a “fun” book. Enter, the Popcon Book!
Will add to my TBR, thanks.
My dad has been referring to most of the books I like to read (especially when I was younger — lots of Stephen King and Michael Palmer) as “popcorn books” for years. I always assumed it was a real term lol