#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Now a major motion picture directed by Steven Spielberg. “Enchanting . . . Willy Wonka meets The Matrix.”—USA Today • “As one adventure leads expertly to the next, time simply evaporates.”—Entertainment Weekly A world at stake. A quest for the ultimate prize. Are you ready? In the year 2045, reality is an ugly place. The only time Wade Watts really feels alive is … the year 2045, reality is an ugly place. The only time Wade Watts really feels alive is when he’s jacked into the OASIS, a vast virtual world where most of humanity spends their days.
When the eccentric creator of the OASIS dies, he leaves behind a series of fiendish puzzles, based on his obsession with the pop culture of decades past. Whoever is first to solve them will inherit his vast fortune—and control of the OASIS itself.
Then Wade cracks the first clue. Suddenly he’s beset by rivals who’ll kill to take this prize. The race is on—and the only way to survive is to win.
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Entertainment Weekly • San Francisco Chronicle • Village Voice • Chicago Sun-Times • iO9 • The AV Club
“Delightful . . . the grown-up’s Harry Potter.”—HuffPost
“An addictive read . . . part intergalactic scavenger hunt, part romance, and all heart.”—CNN
“A most excellent ride . . . Cline stuffs his novel with a cornucopia of pop culture, as if to wink to the reader.”—Boston Globe
“Ridiculously fun and large-hearted . . . Cline is that rare writer who can translate his own dorky enthusiasms into prose that’s both hilarious and compassionate.”—NPR
“[A] fantastic page-turner . . . starts out like a simple bit of fun and winds up feeling like a rich and plausible picture of future friendships in a world not too distant from our own.”—iO9
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I listened to most of the Ready Player One audiobook over the weekend and would recommend both the book itself and the audiobook narration by Wil Wheaton. I had tried to read the ebook when it first came out and lost interest about 10% in because it was about as fun as watching someone else playing a video game. I decided to give it another shot since Spielberg is directing the upcoming adaption and am glad I did.
Yes, you’re basically following along as the main character puzzles his way through various obstacles and beats bad guys and yes, most of the characters have the depth of a Mario brother. But, it’s still pretty fun and I enjoyed all of the 80s pop culture references. Looking forward to seeing how Spielberg creates this particular flavor of dystopian future.
My teenage nephew doesn’t read a lot of books. I bought him this for Christmas after a friend recommended it,. My nephew read it cover to cover and loved it. Books about computer games aren’t normally my cup of tea, but after he told me how much he’d enjoyed it, I read it,too. What a great book! The story is set in a dystopian future where pretty much everyone in the world lives online, in a program called the OASIS. The man who invented the OASIS was a multi-billionaire. When he died, he left his entire fortune to the person who can find an “egg” hidden away somewhere in the OASIS virtual universe.
What a task! The world-building is really believable and immerses you from the start. I loved the teenage hero and his avatar, Parzival, and his crush on the avatar Art3mis was tender and moving in parts. I especially liked the bad guys – a massive corporate bunch of grey-suited avatars who are out to own OASIS and will kill anyone who gets in the way of them finding the egg.
I can see why teenagers love this book. It was really gripping in parts and I was behind the hero all the way. It was great to read something outside my usual reading pile.
I freaking loved this book. I can’t believe it took me so long to discover it! It’s a dystopian YA about a VR massive multiplayer game called Oasis, which has all but taken over society in 2044 — kids go to school within the game, it contains all the knowledge, books, movies, music, etc. that has ever existed, and it’s where people go to socialize and escape the realities of a world plagued by viruses, war, and famine. The protagonist, Wade, is a poor orphan who’s an avid gamer. He goes to school within Oasis, which gives him access to a better education and saved him from bullying in real-world school. He must find the Easter egg its inventor placed within the game (and win his entire fortune of billions) before an evil corporation does, or else they’ll monetize everything, limiting access for the poor and essentially destroy the game.
It’s so fun to learn how Oasis works and watch Wade navigate through this world, and there are tons of references to 80s pop culture I love. Some of it went over my head, but if it didn’t I would assume that anyone could find the “egg”, and the whole thing would have been much less believable. I’d definitely recommend this book to anyone who loves dystopians or gaming/80s culture.
Ready Player One is a fun, exciting trip down memory lane for anybody who is of the Gen-X generation (which includes me). Wade Watts (aka Parzival) is a high school student in the not too distant future where the real world is collapsing from climate change, overpopulation, a prolonged energy crisis and food rationing. While the world is falling apart most people spend nearly all of their time in the virtual world of the OASIS, a computer generated place filled with hundreds of different worlds. More than a game simulation, the OASIS is where people work, shop, and go to school all through the comfort of their home. Now, the creator of the OASIS (James Donovan Halliday) has died and hidden an easter egg in the OASIS, the one who finds it will be given control of the OASIS as well as Halliday’s vast fortune.
I thoroughly enjoyed the book and all of the nostalgia and memories it brought back for me. All of the pop culture references – books, movies, music, video games, role-playing games (except for the giant robots, since I am not very familiar with Japanese mangas and anime with giant robots) were entertaining and fun. They helped to make a geek like me feel like that my life hadn’t been wasted on memorizing movie lines or playing hours of video games. (Not that I expect to be able to hunt in a virtual world to find a vast treasure using these skills. Bummer.) There were many times during the story where I would nod my head at some anecdote or mention of a game or song or movie, or I would laugh aloud at a reference made.
There were opportunities for Cline to have done things differently I felt, that would have added to the tension. A minor character early in the book who is a rival of Parzival and his best friend Aech just disappears and I felt there was an opportunity squandered to have made him a strong foil by joining the bad guys and becoming an obstacle in Parzival’s search for the easter egg. While the action is fast paced at times there were also points where the story bogged a bit in an info dump. This wasn’t often, but it was distracting from the story’s pace. But overall Cline has created a very fun and exciting world with a strong character in Wade (Parzival).
Well holy cow! That was one heck of a game/novel I just finished. Took me years to get past the first 100 pages, but I recently decided to try again. I’m glad I did.
I seriously feel like I just finished playing an intense game on my Playstation. A game that made my hands sweaty from the thrill of facing the final boss, a game with excellent characters I could relate to, a game with a not-so-unrealistic story. If you love gaming, sci-fi fantasy genre of all things entertainment-related, or just grew up in the 80s (or earlier) and 90s then give this novel a try! It starts to pick up when you reach about 25% of the book, and accelerates until the final sentence.
P.s. no cliffhanger, no feelings of a sequel, and no unsatisfying ending.
This is a wonderful book for an ancient geek like me. I owned an Apple ][ and ported the Adventure in Collossal Cave to it (from Fortran to Basic with help in correspondence with Woz). I saw many of the referenced movies when they were in theaters (and many others on tv). And so on. At times it felt like a trivia quiz (who wrote the book about this planet?) where I knew the answers and had read the books long ago. But, of course, that’s just the background. The main plot arc combined mystery, action, romance. So a sci-fi thriller suitable for YA and even more suitable for geeks born in the early 50s (and written by one somewhere in the middle).
Note: I finished the book in the morning and saw the movie in the afternoon. The movie could be a tutorial for how to adapt a large and detail-filled book for screen. A lot was changed, yet the characters were true to the book versions of them and the main arc and overall feel remained.
This was a surprisingly engaging story of massive online gaming in the not too distant future. Not normally my cup of tea but it was so strongly recommended that I gave it a try. Glad I did.
I love this book! So much 80’s Nostalgia for me and I love the whole premise of it. I want to reread it before the movie comes out so I’ll probably be doing that sometime this year, since the movies coming out next March
READY PLAYER ONE is a sci fi thriller with something for everyone: a teen protagonist for the YA crowd but endless references to the eighties for those who lived through that decade.
The not-too-distant dystopian future of the novel provides the perfect backdrop to a race to see who can track down the clues left behind by the creator of the OASIS, the virtual reality with which most of humanity interacts.
Cline doesn’t waste the dramatic opportunities such a premise suggests, and he launches Wade Watts, his nerdy protagonist, on an adventure that will have you turning the pages with relish and cursing the human body’s need for sleep.
Full of pop culture Easter eggs and narrated by an underdog protagonist, this book kept me up way past my bedtime!
I had pretty mixed opinions about this book. I’d heard such amazing things going in that perhaps my expectations were a little too high — I was expecting some serious action and a really incredible plot to just blow me away. While there was definitely action and while Ernest Cline does a pretty phenomenal job with world building (even without understanding most of the 80s pop culture references, the level of detail around the VR world of OASIS is pretty fantastic), the characters and plot were really lacking in my opinion. The plot felt overrun with world-building details, so much so that things seemed to just skip along until there was an opportunity for more love letters to the nerd culture of an earlier decade. The characters were generally one-dimensional and under-developed, which I might have been okay with if one of the only female characters in the book wasn’t a cookie-cutter Manic Pixie Dream Girl. That being said, while I didn’t l aways love the book, I think it’ll make a great film – the world of OASIS is worth experiencing, and I think it will translate really well on screen!
PRO’s: Amazing fun and the nostalgia isn’t lost on me although I didn’t grow up with any of the referenced topics. That’s how good the writing is! How did he make me so nostalgic for something not even from my own past?
Also amazing vision into the future and how it will realistically impact our life.
CON’s: As far as slow starts go, this wasn’t that bad. However, it did take a little of time to get into it.
Just finished this audiobook. Loved it and couldn’t stop listening. A great book that makes you think about technology and entertainment in the future. Though the book is full of 80’s nostalgia, I understood and enjoyed it without needing to know all the references. The adventure awaits, ready player one?
This was an interesting and inventive book. The idea of a virtual reality scenario being used for everything from entertainment to schooling is intriguing and I think that it was explored well. I think that its worth a read and then a re-read.
RPO is a glorious homage to nerd culture of the 70s-90s and a really fun race narrative on top of the fact. If you grew up with this culture or at least grew to love it, then this story is for you. ‘Member Star Wars? Well, if your formative experience of it began with Darth Christensen, you may scratch your head on some of the details, which are incredibly important. That’s because this story is first and foremost a billet doux to a different style nerd, one who was old school and nerded so much harder than you do, son.
You can summarize the entire story as a race to win a contest, which involves finding hidden keys, unlocking gates via challenges, and fighting other players to win a massive pile of money plus ownership/stewardship of the only sensory escape left to mankind — a totally immersive VR version of the Internet in which you can find literally any surrogate existence you could hope for. I can’t wait to see what Steven Spielberg does with the movie, although I doubt it will include anywhere near the number of IP’s referenced in the story.
This was a fantastic book. I kept seeing recommendations for it and I kept ignoring them thinking it couldn’t be as good as people were saying. I finally gave in and read it and I loved it. Growing up in the 80’s this book brought back so many wonderful memories and on top of that it was a fast paced action packed story that was fun to read. I had a hard time putting it down when I had to.
The clear story line of a quest always helps drive a novel forward. I was sick in bed so was able to read the whole book over a 2-day period. I found that some of the 80’s descriptive sections needed only a glance instead of a close read but much of the dialogue and action scenes were compelling.
Just like playing D&D where the early levels are more interesting then later, reading the book and watching a young player expand his powers and reach and turn into something of a super hero is hard to put down.
I see why lots of middle school kids love the book. Too bad the movie went for crazy effects instead of sticking with the very solid story line.
This is one of those books where the film (which I saw when it first came out) and the book (which I just read recently) are very different. Same tone and same wonderful characters (for the most part – there were a few minor differences), but the action was almost unrecognizable beyond the basic structure of the “game”. All of that said, the book is definitely worth reading even (maybe especially) if you enjoyed the film. The book is just so much better and a really fascinating read.
First off, an absolute page-turner. A back to the future feel in more ways than one. The 80’s nostalgia is great fun. Putting that into a futuristic virtual reality setting paired with an epic quest was pure joy for me. Someday, Mr. Cline, I will return the favor.
I wanted to read this book before I go see the movie. I wasn’t quite sure what I was getting into, but I really did end up enjoying it. The world created here is one that is so easily believable. We already spend so much of our time online, that it’s conceivable that we would end up spending our entire lives in an internet world. Known only by avatars, having everything be done via credits and through the web.
It’s also not too far of a stretch to imagine that a governing force would be watching our moves and using that information to better themselves and get ahead…even to the point of threatening the people who could stop them.
I really enjoyed the ending, having these characters you’ve been rooting for meet IRL and everything was a very satisfying way to end the book.