This was a lot of fun, but too much infodumping took me right out of the story too often. All the 80s references were fun, but did get a little old after awhile.

While I wanted to love this one, it was a little too steeped full of references for an interesting story to shine.

I am not a very creative or imaginative person, so it was jarring for me to start a book inside a video game. I know lots of people who've absolutely loved this, so probably a reader problem. The concept is cool.

I'm not sure why this showed up on my dashboard as something needing feedback when it is such an old book that I read a billion years ago, but here is my review from Goodreads from 2012 for your reading pleasure.

While writing this review, I am listening to Ernest Cline’s
official Ready Player One soundtrack mix, a list of all the songs used in the book. Now I don’t have to spend hours hunting down all the songs on my own! He even made it so I could subscribe on Spotify (one of my favorite new music resources), and it’s a pretty damn good playlist.

I love geeking out over the 80s, even though officially I didn’t hit my teen years until the end, so I probably remember the late 80s and 90s a little better. Still, the 80s were a formative decade of my childhood and as such, they still have a shine to them, all the 80s movies and television and music and games and other stuff I remember (even the fashion, though there are some things that should never come back, like scrunch socks and tight-rolling your jeans and curling the huge bangs I could never get the hang of and those little colored rubber bands I put in my braces – though a couple of those may have been the early 90s; like I said, I often get them confused). This is one of the reasons I am such a fan of Psych, and Mystery Science Theater 3000 (they do a hilarious riff on 80s power ballads in Space Mutiny.), and one of the reasons I am such a fan of this book. I’m sure I didn’t catch every reference, but I recognized a fair amount of them, and I felt pumped whenever I did. (That whole argument Wade has with Aech over Ladyhawke is one of my favorite parts of the book.) Ghostbusters! Max Headroom! Super Friends! The Dark Crystal! Real Genius!

I also love video games, though now that I am old, I don’t have much time anymore to finish games that I start (I still buy them and stack them up on my little gaming shelf and wish I had more time to play, but how else am I supposed to keep up with Fall TV season?). One of my earliest gaming memories is playing Zork and getting super pissed because, unlike my brother, I couldn’t map my way through the game and kept going in circles. (I was always a sore loser, too, and still am.) I played all of the King’s Quest games, and Leisure Suit Larry (that’s a great one for the kiddos), and Maniac Mansion, and Galaga, and Duck Hunt, and Pac Man, and Frogger, and Monkey Island (okay, that was the 90s, I know, but they were on floppy discs!) and on and on. We had several of those early PC and gaming systems referenced in the book. And for a while in my 20s, I was quite addicted to Everquest (my first experience with MMORPGs), though I could never handle the sheer need to level up my character anymore just to keep up with my friends. Too much pressure.

Anyway, my immediate love for this book isn’t difficult to explain. You can’t help but love something that takes all of the things from your childhood and elevates them to supremely important worldwide cultural phenomena. This book gives the entire 80s a specialness that validates how fondly I look back at the things I loved (and in some cases, still love – I mean, who doesn’t still love Pat Benatar or Monty Python?) Sure, you can’t really ever go back. But this book says, it’s okay to want to sometimes.

I don’t feel I need to give a plot summary because of the many excellent ones written by other GoodReaders. Basically, for me, this book is a near perfect meld of videogames, SF/fantasy geek cred, and 80s nostalgia, like if The Westing Game, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, WOW, and I Love the 80s had a four-way love child and raised him in a vintage arcade. (I say near perfect because there was a long section in the middle, when Wade is stuck on the second key and busy leveling up his avatar and flirting with/mooning over Art3mis, when I wanted to scream at him to get ON with the quest and stop wasting his time. But I think that may have been the point; it’s easy to lose your way in both a videogame quest and in real life.) Wade and the people who ultimately make up his support system – Art3mis and Aech especially – are easy to root for and like in their smartass geekery (view spoiler), and the Sixers, especially Sorrento, make excellent corporate villains. Wade’s quest to find Halliday’s egg becomes a much larger battle to keep OASIS free and open source, out of the control of those who would charge for it, fill it with advertising, ban free speech, and turn it into a “corporate-run . . . overpriced theme part for wealthy elitists.” OASIS itself is incredibly well-realized, and setting it up could have caused a serious drain on the forward pacing of this novel, but the descriptions of OASIS and its history never felt too extraneous.

Ready Player One is also set in an intriguing future world that doesn’t feel as unlikely as it should. It’s not a stretch for me to believe that we will suffer shortages in space and energy and food and currency, or that we will eventually cause irreparable damage to the environment, or be at war constantly. And it’s not a stretch to believe that people would want to spend their time in a virtual environment like OASIS that is much closer to utopia than they will ever get in the real world. Even people like Wade, who at the outset cannot afford to go traveling much in OASIS, have free access to every book ever written, every TV show and videogame produced, every song recorded; as Wade puts it, all the “knowledge, art, and amusements of all human civilization”. That’s a powerful deterrent from experiencing the real world and all its overwhelming, unsolvable problems.

I appreciated Wade’s journey all the more because of how it ultimately made him wake up to the real world around him, a world without the unlimited possibilities of OASIS, true, but one that could still be changed for the better, without criticizing the validity of the time he spent and relationships he made online.

But mostly, I loved how much sheer FUN this book was. If someone were to catalog all the references in this book, I’d love them forever. And if someone created OASIS, I would visit in a heartbeat, and go looking for Zaphod in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy world, or the Skeeve and Aahz from the Myth Adventures world, or Xanth. What if you could sit in a darkened movie theater and riff on bad movies with Joel, Mike, and the bots? What if you could study with the cast of Community? What if you could run around Rapture for real (safely, of course – I would want some sort of God hack, because I suck at first person shooters)?

Oh, the possibilities for shared world stories are rife. Get on that, authors!

Definitely a favorite and one that stands up well for rereads. The details about 80s geek culture are great, not too overwhelming or offputting if you're not familiar with every facet of geekery Cline visits.

I have no idea why this book showed up on my dashboard. If I ever requested this - and I can't remember doing so - it must have been years ago. Back before I actually read the book. The book itself should appeal to those with a serious case of classic video game nostalgia. It's not my particular brand of sci-fi, though it was still occasionally entertaining.

It is the year 2044 and teenager Wade Watts lives for one thing, the OASIS. In reality, his world is dismal and gray. His parents are dead and he lives in a part of Oklahoma City known as the stacks. He escapes the poverty and crime by escaping to the online world known as the OASIS. Wade does everything the OASIS, he makes friends, he plays video games, he even goes to a virtual school. When not in school he devotes his time trying to find the "Easter Egg" that the OASIS creator hid in the OASIS. The person who finds it will inherit the creator's vast fortune and take over control of the OASIS. When his avatar, Parzival, finds the first key he realizes that he is racing not only to find the egg but racing for his life. There is an entire army of corporate slugs known ad the "Sixers" who are determined to get the egg and will do anything in their power to stop Parzival or anybody else from getting it first. Will Parzival and his band of misfit friends find the egg before the Sixers take them out for good?

I was really surprised at how much I enjoyed Ready Player One. It is a pop culture lover's dream. Wade Watts or Parzival, is a complete misfit who has pinned his future on finding the egg. He has no life outside of the OASIS - his friends live there, he goes to school there, he even has a job there. As someone who is pretty much a homebody with a whole slew of friends that I have met virtually - I can relate. The world outside of the OASIS is very bleak and I could see the world heading that direction very quickly. Parzival has to complete a serious of puzzles and tasks to get the next key. The amount of 80's pop-culture in one book is astounding and so much fun! Movies, TV Shows, Music, Games, and even 80's cereal has a role in this book. Ready Player One is being made into a movie and I cannot wait to see how it translates to the big screen - it is going to be epic!

Bottom line - even though Ready Player One is a gamer's dream book, it will appeal to everybody. There is action, there is friendship, there is the spirit of competition, and of course all of the pop culture. I loved the book so much I bought my gamer step-son a copy. You will want to do the same for the gamer in your life. I promise.