Ready Player One

Ready Player One
by Ernest Cline

In 2044 humanity has bled the world dry of fossil fuels and the majority of people live out their lives in OASIS, a completely immersive virtual world created by James Halliday. Halliday, who grow up during the 1980s let that decade inspire him in everything he did. In his last will Halliday reveals that he, in true video game fashion, has hidden an Easter egg behind three gates within OASIS. Whoever finds it first will receive Halliday's entire fortune and gain total ownership of his company — essentially a modern-day version of the deeds to Willy Wonka's chocolate factory. In the book we follow the young Wade Watts, a gunter (Egg Hunter) in his quest to find the Easter egg and protect OASIS from those who intend to control it for their own nefarious purposes. The limitless virtual world of OASIS is an unabashed love letter to 1980s culture and is ripe with geeky references to movies, music and literature and video games. Anyone who has ever pretended to fight with a light saber or played Dungeons & Dragons until sunrise will feel right at home here. As someone growing up in that decade, Ready Player One was a shot of pure gleeful nostalgia for me, but it can be enjoyed as a great story in its own right, even without getting all the cultural references Ernest Cline throws at the reader. If you prefer movies and video games to the written word, this is the one book you should read this year. -- recommended by Rasmus T. - temporary summer worker at Bennett Martin Public Library

[If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try Redshirts by John Scalzi.]

[Also available in downloadable audio and downloadable E-book formats.]

[ Publisher's official Ready Player One web site ] | [ official Ernest Cline web site (very creatively designed!!) ]

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Customer Review: Ready Player One

Ready Player One
by Ernest Cline [YA Cline]

Ready Player One was a very good book in my opinion. I liked that it combined many different genres. It included fantasy, action, sci-fi, and comedy/pop culture all in one book. The characters were deep, and everyone had their own strengths and weaknesses. People would put up a facade in the Oasis and only at the end of the book do you get to see what they are really like. However, there were some aspects of the book that I did not like. Some pop culture references were too obscure for the targeted audience, young adults. These references, I felt, closed off the book to readers. Also, there were times when the author would repeat phrases four or five times. Maybe this is just me, but I felt Ernest Cline was denying himself creativity. -- review submitted by Gillian T. - a customer of the Gere Branch Library

Have you read this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?

New Customer Reviews appear regularly in the pages of the BookGuide web site, particularly during the Summer Reading Program. You can visit the Customer Reviews page to see them all and/or submit your own, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide blog individually as we receive them.

The Moon Maze Game

The Moon Maze Game
by Larry Niven and Steven Barnes

The Moon Maze Game is the fourth in a sporadic series of novels co-written by Niven and Barnes which revolve around Live Action Role Playing gamers and the Dream Park corporation. The first three books in the series (Dream Park [1981], The Barsoom Project [1989], and The California Voodoo Game [1992]) were all set on earth and involved complex multi-layered plots incorporating quirky characters, believable technological advances and thriller elements. For the fourth book, set decades from now, the action has moved to the moon, where humanity has had an industrial and recreational colony for some time. When the first off-world LARPing game is announced to take place on the moon, the creme-de-la-creme of Gamemasters, Loremasters and regular gamers compete to secure positions in "the game". Among the players is the scion to an African nation's leader, and when terrorists attempt to kidnap him within the framework of the "game", what had been a challenging but ultimately only ego-brusing competition becomes a life-and-death struggle. Trapped within a fictional storyline of Victorian-era space explorers on the moon, the gamers find themselves trying to stay one step ahead of political revolutionaries and mercenaries, with ideological fervor and vengence on their side. This was a solid action-adventure thriller with a good scifi flavor and setting. Those who enjoyed the earlier three books will appreciate the next-generation ties to characters and events set earlier in the timeline. While I enjoyed it and do recommend it, the ending felt a bit rushed, and the "bad guys" were somewhat two-dimensional. Readers should really give Dream Park and The California Voodoo Game a read first! [If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try the other three books in the series. Also the Guardians of the Flame series by Joel Rosenberg, in which fantasy Role Playing Gamers find themselves transported to a real world that plays by the game's rules.] -- recommended by Scott C. - Bennett Martin Public Library

[ Wikipedia entry for Dream Park ] | [ Wikipedia page for Larry Niven ] | [ Wikipedia page for Steven Barnes ]

Have you read this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?

New reviews appear every month on the Staff Recommendations page of the BookGuide web site. You can visit that page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide blog individually over the course of the entire month.