Name: Ready Player One: A Novel
Rating: 4.042877906976744 (1720 reviews)
ISBN: 9781524763282

Ernest Cline

Ready Player One: A Novel

𝒕𝒉𝒐𝒎

Ho creato OASIS perché non sentivo di avere un posto, nel mondo reale. Lì, non sapevo come creare un legame con le persone. Ho avuto paura per tutta la mia vita. Fino al momento in cui ho saputo che stava finendo. Solo a quel punto ho compreso che, per quanto terrificante e dolorosa possa essere la realtà, è l’unico posto in cui si può trovare la vera felicità. Perché la realtà… è reale. Mi capisci?

Immersing himself in a mid-21st-century technological virtual utopia to escape an ugly real world of famine, poverty and disease, Wade Watts joins an increasingly violent effort to solve a series of puzzles by the virtual world's super-wealthy creator, who has promised that the winner will be his heir. (This book was previously listed in Forecast.)

Ready Player One

Jose Sbuck

My expectations were too high for this book. The dystopian future is well constructed and provides a great backdrop for the story. Unfortunately the story is predictable and even childish, like in Hollywood movies. The protagonist gets into trouble and if nothing else helps, the author introduces an all-powerful wizard or technological artefact to help out. Not very convincing.. The story is about a world after energy crisis, where reality is harsh and poor and people spend most of their time in virtual reality. The virtual reality however is threatened by an evil mega-corporation that wants to generate even more profits out of the system. The protagonist must win the competition and solve the riddles before the megacorp's drones. Strangely, the book is from 2011, but it feels very timely now in 2017. Virtual reality is all hyped up and we've only seen the first glimpse of VR's potential. We've also seen how people spend more and more time on social media and multiplayer game worlds. The book presents a plausible future, with references to e.g. Bladerunner and Neuromancer. By the way, Ready Player One managed to raise my interest to computer/console games. The author writes lovingly about the classics and the enthusiasm is contagious. I would recommend this book to maybe 15-year-olds.

Katy Welyczko

I got about halfway through and I couldn't put it down!!

Julie Strietelmeier

Sarthak Verma

I am not a hard-core gamer but I had a hard time putting it down. It's as good as it comes. Extremely immersive, surreal, and addictive.

M. Sosotris

I have to say, this book took over my life temporarily. I couldn't stop reading even if I wanted to. It's not perfect, but it certainly knows how to draw readers in.

The premise is simple: it's 2044, the world sucks, and the online world of the OASIS--a sort of mash-up of The Sims, World of Warcraft, and Second Life--is where most everyone spends their time. When the game's creator, James Halliday (a sort of Walt Disney/Howard Hughes character), dies, he releases his will in video form which promises his entire fortune to the first OASIS user who can find a hidden Easter Egg embedded in the game somewhere by following a series of clues based on Halliday's obsessive nostalgia for 80's pop culture. User Parzival (real name Wade Watts) becomes one of the egg hunters (called gunters) questing for the prize, but he soon realizes that this is way more than a simple treasure hunt.

I gave this book 4 stars for the characters. Parzival, Aech, and Art3mis are wonderful and complex and relatable. You genuinely care about all of them and the whole concept of online friends, people one has never actually met in person, is really explored well. I completely fell in love with all three of them and they make the book entirely worthwhile.

I took off one star because the whole thing was just a little too neat and tidy. I could see the author's brushstrokes everywhere and, plot-wise, it was maddeningly predictable. Not only that, but there were many instances of easy solutions being retroactively inserted at convenient times (Oh I was able to defeat the dragon because I conveniently came here three weeks ago and placed a specific anti-dragon sword here to pick up. Sorry, I forgot to mention that until now). That's not anything from the story, but that's what it was like at times. 

The challenges of the quest never really felt that challenging because most were preceded with a reminder to the audience that the protagonist had conveniently studied the specific 80's reference that informs the challenge during his initial gunter research. And so the author has to throw in a lot of obvious obstacles to keep things from being too easy for the characters. 

But it does function as a gripping quest story nonetheless. It reads like a side-scrolling video game. The prose is direct, simple, and resorts to telling more often than showing (interspersed with lots of fun nerdy infodumps). The characters are deep and complex and wonderful, but they exist in a pretty flat world that is described adequately, but never really jumps out at the reader. It more often than not feels backdrop-y. There is something to be said for austere simplicity, but in a book like this, I wanted more. Instead of textures and sensory details, we get lots of descriptions of conventions and social mores in the OASIS as well as treatises on why nerd culture in the 80's was so amazing.

It's like this book is trying to be critical of the detached nature of an online existence, but at the same time is so comfortable in that world that it doesn't protest TOO much. I applaud the author's ability to replicate the feeling of online interaction so well, but the plot itself feels too artificial to really be believable. Reading the book is like playing a diverting arcade game, so I'm not sure if I should say the author didn't succeed at his task, but I would have liked a more organic plot. I may have also missed the point since a big theme of the story is pop culture and the recognizable and predictable narratives to be found there. So I may just be complaining for no reason.

But with that said, I still recommend it. It's a fun read, filled with nerdy references and magnificent characters. There are many moments that gave me a big stupid grin, and I went into book withdrawal while doing other boring things like going to work and interacting with human beings. So, don't think too hard about it. Read it and enjoy it for what it is, and fall in love with the characters. 

(seriously, I want to take them all home with me).

{Edit: if you have a chance, listen to the unabridged audiobook version, narrated by Wil Wheaton. It's marvelous}

This book is nostalgia on steroids. As a child raised by parents of the 70s, 80s, and 90s, I was surprised how many references I caught on. While I never played many of the old game consoles mentioned, I did watch many of the movies & TV shows, listen to most of the music, and have very fond memories of playing, and watching my parents play, the old video games that led us to the modern Era of gaming, streaming, AI, and VR that we know today. 

This book was just fun. It felt like the escape from reality that we all want, and dare I say, need, from the crazy world around us. Loved it!

Emma Lechner

This book is nostalgia on steroids. As a child raised by parents of the 70s, 80s, and 90s, I was surprised how many references I caught on. While I never played many of the old game consoles mentioned, I did watch many of the movies & TV shows, listen to most of the music, and have very fond memories of playing, and watching my parents play, the old video games that led us to the modern Era of gaming, streaming, AI, and VR that we know today. 

This book was just fun. It felt like the escape from reality that we all want, and dare I say, need, from the crazy world around us. Loved it!

Paula Plaza Ponte 

Hhmmm. Sooooo, if you love the 80s (music, movies, video games, pop culture) and 80s romcoms or want to know a lot of its references- this is a book for you. Cline writes a geeky love letter to this decade determined to cover all bases. A little painful at the start, the first few chapters feel like needles in your eye. Once Parzival/WOW makes his first discovery though, you just trust the geekiness, imagine Spielberg’s interpretation(I haven’t seen the movie), suspend your disbelief, smell the aerosol and go along for the ride. Before you know it, despite drowning in cliches - you’re rooting for the top five and hating on Sorrento and the evil Sixers. I’m glad I reached the end. Being an 80s kid, it fit the familiar genre I grew up with (cheesy 80s flicks where every problem is solved, love requited and magical artifacts conveniently available for the protagonist whenever he needed it). The writing left me needing more but the rest, just felt fun to be part of. Like plant vs zombies. Or Weird Science.

siegs

Fun and accessible sci-fi novel with tons of 80's nostalgia

PRE-ORDER NOW - READY PLAYER TWO: THE SEQUEL ______________________ THE BOOK BEHIND THE MAJOR MOTION PICTURE DIRECTED BY STEVEN SPIELBERG Now available for the first time in a beautiful hardback edition, perfect for hardcore fans and collectors A world at stake. A quest for the ultimate prize. Are you ready? It's the year 2044, and the real world has become an ugly place. We're out of oil. We've wrecked the climate. Famine, poverty, and disease are widespread. Like most of humanity, Wade Watts escapes this depressing reality by spending his waking hours jacked into the OASIS, a sprawling virtual utopia where you can be anything you want to be, where you can live and play and fall in love on any of ten thousand planets. And like most of humanity, Wade is obsessed by the ultimate lottery ticket that lies concealed within this alternate reality: OASIS founder James Halliday, who dies with no heir, has promised that control of the OASIS - and his massive fortune - will go to the person who can solve the riddles he has left scattered throughout his creation. For years, millions have struggled fruitlessly to attain this prize, knowing only that the riddles are based in the culture of the late twentieth century. And then Wade stumbles onto the key to the first puzzle. Suddenly, he finds himself pitted against thousands of competitors in a desperate race to claim the ultimate prize, a chase that soon takes on terrifying real-world dimensions - and that will leave both Wade and his world profoundly changed. ____________________________________ If you loved READY PLAYER ONE and can't wait for more, check out ARMADA, Ernest Cline's geek masterpiece! 'Wildly original and stuffed with irresistible nostalgia, Ready Player One is a spectacularly genre-busting, ambitious, and charming debut' Independent 'Part intergalactic scavenger hunt, part romance, and all heart' CNN 'Ernest Cline's novel deserves to be a modern classic' SciFiNow 'Gorgeously geeky, superbly entertaining, this really is a spectacularly successful debut' Daily Mail

The global bestseller and now a major Steven Spielberg movie

Luke Harkness

One of the best sci-fi books I've read. The world is a a truly believable, immersive futuristic landscape and theory. The characters are deep, developed, loable, dislikeable but all intriguing. The story could have been so simple but tells so many deeper stories within it making you think about things you really wouldn't think the book would make you think about! I would highly recommend this to fans of sci-fi, fans of books with adventure journeys, fans of books on governmental regimes, fans of books about MMOs, fans of books about romances. It's become an instant classic for me and has made me very excited to watch the film!

Lindy

Dude, this was awful. And I write this as a classic sci-fi reading, prog listening weirdo, okay?

I'm just going to list my grievances:
1)Ready Player One is billed as a love letter to 80s pop culture, but in reality it's a hagiographic love letter to the part of nerd culture which privileges memorizing obscene quantities of trivia in order to impress other people, (view spoiler)[(Like, Flicksyncs? 4realsies? That "game" format sounds boring as dirt) (hide spoiler)] without transforming or even reflecting on that knowledge in any way. Near the beginning of the book, the protagonist talks about how 80s music is all over the pop charts. Not 80s-inspired music, like what is actually popular with the music press as I am typing this, but the same old 80s music that played on radios in the 80s. I find the overall effect to be very sad, because these teenage characters have no culture they can call their own. 
2)Going along with that, the actual plot of the book was the most basic, fantasy-by-the-numbers I've read in a long time, with way too many things that happened just because they'd be convenient for the plot. (view spoiler)[For example, revealing that the protagonist purchased a bunch of IOI passcodes just because 'they might come in handy someday' when the protagonist is trying to hack into the IOI intranet. (hide spoiler)] And of course the story wraps up nicely with a bow on top with a bunch of platitudes ripped directly from after-school specials.
3) Not to sound like a commie freak, but why is GSS/Halliday universally considered benevolent and good when it sounds like they've got a monopoly on almost all forms of entertainment? And why is IOI vilified in the book for more or less the same thing? Not to mention the ethical questions that Art3mis, and only Art3mis, start bringing up about the sheer magnitude of the reward and how the money could probably stimulate the global economy/make major headway on environmental cleanup/employ people. 
4)Everything involving Aech's big reveal was handled so poorly I think I would have preferred the book not contain it at all. (view spoiler)[So virtual realities are fantastic, equitable spaces of opportunity for women, black people, and gays, but only if they pretend to be straight white men? What a gr8, uplifting message there. (hide spoiler)]
5) Everything resembling "romance" in this story was stupid as hell.
6) I want to know more about this world outside OASIS where the waiting list for fast food job openings is two years and the US federal government is basically a non-entity and yet SNL is still for whatever reason relevant and popular. Who are these people who watch it??

In conclusion, I hate techbros even more after reading Ready Player One, because the experience was like watching one masturbate for six hours. 

Also, who wants to bet that Cline's favorite childhood book was The Westing Game (Ellen Raskin, 1978)?

ERNEST. CLINE

The Global Bestseller and Now a Major Steven Spielberg Movie

What a story! Cline did a fantastic job creating this dystopian version of a world not far from our own. This story was vivid, exciting, and memorable. The only critique I have is the romantic subplot. I wish it would say further in the back but I understand the message he was trying to get at. Def a great read:)

Abigail Marie

I am referring to the German translation here, so take my criticism with a grain of salt. The story seemed interesting enough in the beginning, but lost momentum, and overall seemed shallow in terms of plot and character development. What I found really disappointing was the weak language of the book – but again, that might be the translation.

Lucas Dietrich

thea

Tobias V. Langhoff

This story is the wet dream of any misfit high-schooler who was out of place in the real world and escaped to the Internet to be cool and have a life. The real world sucks even more here than when I was a teenager; it’s a horrible, horrible dystopia and the cyberspace is the last remaining beautiful place on Earth.

The Internet is now only used for one thing, which has displaced all other online technologies: A virtual reality world used by literally everyone on the planet. The creators of this virtual reality, two old school Generation X geeks heavily based on John D. Carmack and John Romero, put in a lot of references to popular fiction from the 80s. (In addition to all the video games and movies you need to be familiar with to enjoy this novel, I strongly recommend Masters of Doom for an account of Carmack and Romero’s lives and friendship).

Before his death, one of the creators put the ultimate easter egg into the virtual world, and finding it (which can obviously only be done by an obsessive-compulsive 80’s geek like our protagonist teenager) will award not only a million bajillion dollars but also ownership of the company that runs the virtual world. An evil ISP with near-monopoly wants this reward in order to also turn the virtual world into a dystopia like the real world. Pretty much like how our contemporary American ISPs want to destroy net neutrality.

A book about a virtual reality or proxy combat could easily fall prey to the stakes being low or the consequences not really mattering, but Cline made sure that the all-encompassing virtual world was more important than the real world, so dying in there matters; also, the plot throws some real-life danger at the protagonist as well.

I bought this for my Kindle over two years ago, because a lot of people with the same interests as me liked it. Then I put off reading it, because a lot of people who like the same literature as me detested it. It’s a divisive book, and I get it. It’s not high literature, but it’s kind of a guilty pleasure story – a kind of Fifty Shades of Grey for geeks who were bullied in school and played MMOs for escapism. When I read it, though, I realized how long it has been since I had fun while reading a book. Not that it’s especially funny, as opposed to, say, Moby-Dick and Gravity's Rainbow which are some of the funniest books I know, but reading this novel is more like plopping in front of Netflix and binging a dumb but entertaining show for an evening. Or maybe more like binging a more poorly written 
  Stranger Things
 on Netflix!

It’s not horribly written, but like a lot of debut YA novels, the worst part is the dialogue. Nobody talks like that. And the romance subplot made me cringe throughout. I thought it was going to redeem itself at one point ((view spoiler)[when it was revealed that Aech was a woman, I thought she would reveal that she was in love with Wade – Aech did say “I love you, man” in one of their last virtual encounters before meeting IRL – but that didn’t happen and I guess Aech’s character arc was fine as it was (hide spoiler)]), but no.

It’s a bit weird that a book that so clearly is trying to woo people who grew up in the 1980s, also clearly is a YA book. I guess the books might be aimed at young people who didn’t grow up in the 80s but who wish they did, just like the protagonist? If so, I guess I’m in the right demographic myself, being born in 1987, but I’m probably not alone among video game/sci-fi/computer interested millenials in that I wish I was born just a few years earlier (le wrong generation, am i rite) and harbor a kind of lost nostalgia for a decade I didn’t get to experience first hand.

chloe rae

Ok, this book is AWESOME.
That was a blast! There isn't much about this book that I didn't enjoy. I loved the characters and how different Wade's voice was. I loved the little romance we got but even more so: THE FRIENDSHIP. I loved how loyal Wade was to his friends. The plot was definitely interesting and totally captivating. I completely understand why this book is loved so dearly. 
Now, though I consider myself a geek, this novel was definitely beyond my level of understanding at times. Some 80's references I was able to pick up quickly, like the music and movie references. But all of the talk about the games, whether D&D or console/computer games really confused me. There are just SO MANY REFERENCES, guys. I couldn't keep up at times. I just kept wishing I knew what certain things meant (and I googled a lot of them). I also thought the pacing at the beginning was a little slow for me. I wasn't hooked right away and almost put this book down to come back to later.
Overall, stellar read. I mean, this book references The Iron Giant! How rad! Can't wait to watch the movie!

This definitely gets a spot on my all time favourite books list. 

Let me just start by saying that I haven't read it quite a while. With many things going on, I just couldn't find the time or even the motivation to read. This book, proved to be the perfect thing to get me out of my reading slump.

This book is action packed. There are times when it calms down, and you're just waiting for the next move but it seems like nothing is happening, but I suppose that it's actually better that way. The action is spread out quite well, not forcing upon you every second, but it builds it up.

Another thing that I truly enjoyed is the splash of romance this book has. It isn't overwhelming or underwhelming, it actually fits into the narrative without feeling forced.

But I truly got a kick out of the 80s references. Even though I was not born into that culture, or have family members or friends that rave about it, I thoroughly enjoyed it. How everything was explained so well, it's perfect for anyone who has absolutely no idea about the references, and also gives people who are educated in the art of 80s references, a huge nostalgic surge.

It has gotten me on such a high. I feel so immersed in this book, I laugh and sigh and shout out loud, which can be disturbing when you read on the bus. I'm still really excited even though it's now over.

Basically, this book is for anyone that enjoy adventure, games and/or 80s references. And even if you don't like any of those, go and give this a try, it might surprise you.

Ready Player One: A Novel

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