Ready Player One

This book was lent to me by a fabulous little waitress at a restaurant I visit very frequently. It was extraordinarily kind of her to do so!

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline is a decidedly different novel, and a testament to all of you video game nerds out there, both young and old. Wade Owen Watts is a teenager who grew up in a dystopian America where the real world isn't worth living in, so an alternate reality in the form of an advanced MMORPG called OASIS is used for people to live with abandonment, away from the real world. Sort of like the way we use the internet today.
The creator of OASIS, an eccentric multi-billionaire who was obsessed with the 1980's (the decade he spent his teenaged years), has died and sets the world on fire when he sends everyone on a hunt for an Easter Egg he personally programmed into the game. The hunt is more or less forgotten (though always in the back of everyone's minds) when Wade finds the first clue after years.
Ready Player One is unlike anything I've ever read - that part is very true. The entire novel is one big writhing basket of fan-service. In fact, while I appreciate that as a nerd, it was often too much for my tastes. Other reviewers referred to it as an "info-dump," and that's pretty accurate. The beginning half of the novel stalled to a halt while we were flooded with information on video games, movies, and music circa the 1980's, as well as trying to get a feel for the two settings the novel occupies.
You see, while I enjoy sci-fi novels, they all invent their own unique worlds and rules, and so I think it takes a reader some time to acquaint themselves. Or maybe that's just me. Ernest Cline used a good chunk of that time to barrage us with 80's cult classic trivia. Clearly he was just super excited to be able to write a novel like this, like the true nerd he is. How do I know? Besides the fact that he's written this book, as well as the movie Fan Boys, just look at his author photo -

- the man has a Delorian. I'm sorry, but no one else on Earth could have been better qualified to write this book. 

As cool as the idea for this book was, I was sorry to have given in 2 stars on Goodreads. It was hard for me to keep myself interested in this book. Not only because of the info-dumping, but also because I didn't care for Wade's character. I have a personal issue with arrogant, nerdy boys (who are usually fedora wearing chubs) that expect no one to live up to their glorious, shining standards. I have had enough interactions with real life Wade Watts to find the fictional one a big enough jackfruit. Of course, Wade is a teenager, and that's pretty universally true for most teenaged boys. It still doesn't mean I have to fall in love with this annoying little Holden Caulfield.

I'm going to go ahead and say that if you're a male reader and you love any amount of video games, sci-fi, comic books, anime, etc, you will enjoy this book (and you may already be a fan of Cline's career). As for me, I found it "meh." And that's from a girl who once broke her bedroom ceiling fan pretending to be Aries from Final Fantasy 7.