Ready Player One

Ready Player One is never a book I would have bought for myself. For one, its adult fiction, which is just, well, gross and boring, and two it didn’t seem like my type of thing. I like romance and fantasy and witches and fairies, not…the eighties as an era and virtual realities.

However, when you are an English major in college and currently an English teacher by day, people get you books for Christmas. It is a thing ™. So my good-natured neighbor, who also makes the most delicious banana bread, got me Ready Player One by Ernest Cline.

Not going to lie, the cover looked lame and I had never heard of it and I stashed it away in the books-we-don’t-speak-of pile for almost a year until I picked it up and read it because frankly I didn’t have anything else to read and I figured it would be a waste to you know, throw it away or donate it.

So here we are. Almost a full year and a half after I first received it and after I’ve finally read it (and watched the terrible movie). I’ll try to keep this short and simple. The book was better than I thought it would be.

It wasn’t too hard for me to vibe with the characters since when the novel starts, the main character, Wade Watts, is a senior in high school and not too far from the main characters that I tend to stray towards in YA. 

So, Wade Watts is a typical literature orphan who lives with his horribly negligent aunt and his whole life’s purpose and happiness derives from a virtual reality simulation called The Oasis.

People’s lives inside the Oasis have become just as much real and valuable as people’s lives outside the Oasis and because the world is such a poverty-stricken, pollution ridden hell hole, people tend to spend more of their time stuck inside a virtual reality to escape from their actual reality since it sucks the big hairy meatball.

This of course, presents the age-old questions since Plato posed it in his fable of “The Myth of the Cave.” Are your choices and your life real if it is inside a virtual reality? Are emotions? Your thoughts? Feelings? It’s an interesting conundrum and Cline doesn’t so much as answer it as he does play out his novel and let you decide for yourself whether it counts or doesn’t, although it becomes clear in the end what his stance is on this particular issue.

The plot of the novel revolves largely around a competition that is currently ongoing and thought to be impossible before our main boy Wade makes the first moves and solves the first riddle.

The creator of the Oasis, James Halliday, hid a gargantuan sum of money inside the game called an “Easter egg” as well as the power to control the whole of the simulation for whoever was able to find his three doors and complete his quest.

Wade Watts has dedicated his whole life to this quest and along the way finds virtual love, loss of friends and foes, and countless dangerous situations inside and outside the simulation.

While I enjoyed the plot and Wade was a tolerable main protagonist, what really fascinated me was the author’s knowledge of 80’s pop music, retro video games, television shows, and general pop culture. 

Littered throughout the book are countless allusions to shows in real life, movies, books, video games, manga, anime, and especially arcade games. I loved learning these little facts and tidbits and it made the reading experience very enjoyable when I knew they existed in the real world-in my world.

I often found myself researching some game mentioned or some movie just to give myself a more accurate depiction of what Wade and the others were going through. Overall, I largely enjoyed the book except for the ending. I found the ending pedantic, trite, and downright hackneyed. Nothing happened. He won the game and that was that.

 It felt very much like an April Fool’s joke but it wasn’t. Either I’ve become very systematic in how I view endings from YA that often conclude with a sardonic twist or a shocking revelation, but the ending to Ready Player One was just too…easy. It was boring. Not that it was bad it was just very predictable, which I found to be a huge letdown.

Recommendation: If you love the 80’s and are a giant nerd of video game history and how games have evolved over the centuries this book will be an absolute delight for you. I recommend only reading the book knowing the ending will not blow your socks off, but at least deliver on a anticipated note and never, ever watch the movie under any circumstances as it was the most wretched thing I’ve seen since M. Night Shyamalan’s

production of Avatar: The Last Airbender.

Score: 7/10