Name: Kyle McDonald's review of Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
Item: Ready Player One
Rating: 5
Author: Kyle McDonald

Ernest Cline

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

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?

Kyle McDonald

ERNEST. CLINE

The Global Bestseller and Now a Major Steven Spielberg Movie

i did not expect to like this book as much as i did, but it was sm fun!! honestly had a great time, even if i'm not that into video games

i also feel like a whole new level of pop culture opened up to me bc i suddenly understand so many references, like that one community episode suddenly makes a lot of sense...love when that happens

Stas

okay so...hear me out...

i did not expect to like this book as much as i did, but it was sm fun!! honestly had a great time, even if i'm not that into video games

i also feel like a whole new level of pop culture opened up to me bc i suddenly understand so many references, like that one community episode suddenly makes a lot of sense...love when that happens

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!

Melissa J

When I first started to read it, I found it really difficult to continue, mainly because it bored me. However, I kept reading 'till I got where the story really started and I love it. It is true that you don't understand all the references at first (if you even get to understand them later), but the author explains everything and I found myself with a book about popular culture that I really enjoyed. Some things I knew beforehand and others I didn't, but I had a great time reading it anyways. It is also very fast to read. I finished it in 4 days, more or less, but I'm sure other people will be able to do it in less time.

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)?

Rosibel Silva Pineda

A veces se hace tedioso de leer por todas las referencias y cosas técnicas que debe explicar, pero si la lees en audio libro se hace más llevadero.
Buena trama, bien manejada, universo bien construido.
Recomendada.

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

Vicky  Nuñez 

Re-Read this before the movie comes out! It was just as great!

I wasn't going to review this because I saw it as pointless to write about how much I loved this book when there are so many beautiful reviews that illustrate its greatness in a more detailed and accurate way, but I loved it so much that I'll ignore my first impulse and tell to all who care to see this: THIS BOOK IS GREAT.

Ready Player One its one of those books that the instant I read its first word, I was immersed in its plot. I think its really easy to relate to what Wade is going through, he's underdog and this makes him the perfect character to cheer on. 

I loved the nerdyness in the book and it was just one of the many things that made it perfect. I can't think of a single thing I hated about it.

If you love video games, or the 80s, or you are an overall fan of good science fiction or fantasy, read it!

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

lily

holy hell this is one of the cringiest books i've ever read

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!

Brooke Lonegan

A blast- not usually a dystopian sci-fi/ fiction fan but this was a fun one and a relatively quick read.

Doris Ivandic 

I found this book to be unique and also very fun! The details were great and I could picture everything vividly. Such a cool book.

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.

Julia Moran 

I still haven't finished processing this book, just amazing world building, it truly exceeded every expectation I had, I thought I was gonna find this boring but everything is just so wonderfully constructed that every second was entertaining. I don't think this is a book for everyone tho...

Ally

** spoiler alert **
           3.5 The actual concept is really cool but the execution was off. You could tell the author was new to writing because the flow was not right. The end gives you satisfied feelings but I want to know what they did with their newfound wealth. Throughout the book it was a lot of explanation of the world and how the OASIS worked, which was necessary, but not fun to constantly encounter. I also don’t think the romance was necessary but it was cute to see how those characters interacted. After finishing I want to know more about Og. I felt like the author didn’t express how most people would react to being the first person to get the key or egg. Both times they were like wow cool not WOW I JUST DID THAT?!! Also, the Japanese culture in here IS CRINGE. A lot of bowing and -san.

Gianna Kristen

CAN'T WAIT FOR STEVEN SPIELBERG TO BUTCHER THE BOOK! BUT THIS BOOK IS AMAZING! THE 80'S POP CULTURE WASN'T MY FORTE BUT I APPRECIATED EVERY REFERENCE THAT WAS MENTIONED. 


DISCLAIMER: I WILL STILL TREASURE THE MOVIE BECAUSE SPIELBERG IS AMAZING

esperanza 

could not finish. wade watts is annoying, and the way cline wrote some characters is really insensitive?? like huh? i couldn't finish and probably never will.

Quinn Tenorio

As with all movies (almost), the book is better than the movie, which is true here as well. Having enjoyed fiction and science fiction growing up, I enjoyed reading Ready Player One as it brought me back to when I was younger.

Aamna

This was fun. I was surprised to get as many of the 80s references as I did.

Kyle McDonald &
Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

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