Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
***SPOILERS***
Summary (Goodreads): It’s the year 2044, and the real world is an ugly place.
Like most of humanity, Wade Watts escapes his grim surroundings by spending his waking hours jacked into the OASIS, a sprawling virtual utopia that lets you be anything you want to be, a place where you can live and play and fall in love on any of ten thousand planets.
And like most of humanity, Wade dreams of being the one to discover the ultimate lottery ticket that lies concealed within this virtual world. For somewhere inside this giant networked playground, OASIS creator James Halliday has hidden a series of fiendish puzzles that will yield massive fortune — and remarkable power — to whoever can unlock them.
For years, millions have struggled fruitlessly to attain this prize, knowing only that Halliday’s riddles are based in the pop culture he loved — that of the late twentieth century. And for years, millions have found in this quest another means of escape, retreating into happy, obsessive study of Halliday’s icons. Like many of his contemporaries, Wade is as comfortable debating the finer points of John Hughes’s oeuvre, playing Pac-Man, or reciting Devo lyrics as he is scrounging power to run his OASIS rig.
And then Wade stumbles upon the first puzzle…
This book was amazing – I’m so glad it came with last months lootcrate (you can check out my review of the Feb lootcrate here)
RP1 is filled with more geek that you can shake a joystick at and is jammed packed with so many 80’s references that I struggled to keep up in some places. I’m a few years shy of appreciating all the 80’s movie references but the gamer in me purred over the references to the older systems and games and I have a lot of the bands mentioned on my regular playlists. Who doesn’t like to rock out to some classic 80’s tunes?
What I loved most was that RP1 is not just a bit of nostalgia fluff – The plot keeps you guessing while being easy to follow and it’s no surprise this is a Geek favourite. The characters are easy to identify with and the ‘baddies’ are very easy to hate
Cline’s world building really sucked me in, I was practically salivating over the oasis hardware and the oasis game itself. I think I read the entire thing in 3 and a half hours, although it starts with a slow build the ending races up to meet you. I can’t believe that it’s taken me this long to read it.
It feels like i’m gushing again but i loved this book. Its secured a place on my Most Loved bookshelf
You don’t need to be an 80’s expert and I can’t think of any geek who wouldn’t enjoy this.
If you have already read RP1 let me know what you thought in the comments!
NoisyGeek Rating: 5 out of 5
Noisygeek 