Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
I just finished listening to the audio version of Ready Player One. I'm not sure if this is considered a YA novel or not, but it has the feel of a YA novel aside for the occasional cuss word. It was fantastic. Hands down the best book I've read all year. The Amazon description is as follows.
"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."
The book mostly focuses on the genre of the 1980's with some 70's, 90's and 00's and encompasses all that geek culture loves from rubicks cubes, Star Wars, and Firefly to Monty Python, The Clash, Gundam, The Matrix, and all that lies between. It was a blast to read and had the unfortunate side effect of making me look up all the references I didn't know or hadn't seen (I am currently now watching the movie Ladyhawk and have War Games qued on Netflix).
Mostly it's a sort of reminder of where video games are headed, and what "games" like Second Life hope to someday be. But, on the flip side what happens to a world that starts living inside a video game to escape their problems.
I honestly cannot stop gushing over this book, but that is probably because I am a nerd at heart.
Bobette started this discussion 1 year ago. ( | permalink )
