Who knew playing Pac-Man could save your life?

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline was a big hit in the book world a couple of years ago, so of course I only got around to reading it now.  The novel wasn't even on my radar until I saw that it was an available audiobook at the Chicago Public Library, and then suddenly all of the positive, gushing reviews I had read of it on the interwebs came back to me, and I was quite happy to download it.

Luckily, the audiobook version is awesome.  I have been uber-lucky recently with my audiobook selections (well, except for Mrs. Dalloway, but that was not the fault of the narrator, just an issue with the book format succeeding on audio).  Will Wheaton narrated this book and he was absolutely fantastic.  I do not really "follow" audiobook narrators, but I may just start following Wheaton because he did this one really, really well.  Even at the start of the book, which took forever to get to the point, I was thoroughly engaged because he was so good at showing Wade's enthusiasm and excitement and you couldn't help but be enthusiastic, too.

I wish I had a really good word for those books that you become completely addicted to in the moment but know that this obsession will end pretty quickly once you finish it.  It's like a massive word gorge session, followed by a long book nap after which you vaguely remember having read a book in a very short amount of time but since it was so fast, you can't be sure if it was all a dream or real.  I don't know how to describe this better than that - why don't words exist for this experience?!  I assume it has been a common occurrence ever since books came into existence.

Hopefully at least one of you knows what I am talking about.

Anyway, I still haven't gotten around to describing this book.  Possibly because there's so much back story.  At a basic level, Ready Player One is about Wade, a high school senior in 2044 who loves immersing himself in the OASIS, an immersive online experience that people now use to escape the horrible world they really do live in.  He's also really into pop culture from the 1980s because he is desperate to win this crazy, world-wide contest that the creator of the OASIS embedded into the game.  But no one has even solved the first clue in the five years since the contest launched.  Until Wade figures it out and becomes the high scorer.  And then everyone is scrambling to win the prize.

There were many things I enjoyed about this book.  First, I appreciated its fast pace.  I don't actually know the last time I read a fast-paced book, but they have a lot to offer!  This made my commute to work and two plane rides go very quickly, and even though the audiobook is more than 13 hours long I finished it in just a few days.  I pretty much listened to this book any time I could.  It was horrible because I got to a REALLY important part right near the end just as I pulled into work yesterday morning and then I had to wait the entire day until I could finish the book and it was just agony.  But then I finished and it was great but then I went straight into the "book nap" situation I mentioned above.

I also really liked the 1980s cultural references.  I grew up in the 1980s and 1990s, and it was fun to be reminded of movies like Ferris Bueller's Day Off and video games like Pac-Man and books by Kurt Vonnegut.  They felt weirdly current as everyone in the book knew everything about 80s culture, way more than anyone who lived through the decade probably does.  It was fun, if quite excessive.  Not sure I needed to hear all of those facts recited by every character, but clearly Ernest Cline has some serious trivia skills.  There was a lot of background information for this book and I got a bit bogged down in it.

I think this book made me truly appreciate how far technology has come over the past 30 years.  It's so easy for us to look at our lives now and think that this is how they have always been.  Or look back on five years ago as "back in the day."  But reading this book made me realize just how everything started back in the heady early days of computer animation.  And it was really cool to remember just how exciting it felt to first hold a cell phone in your hands or see the way a remote control could move something on a screen, or the awesomeness of Nintendo's Power Pad way before Kinect was ever invented.  It makes you realize just how much of a continuum technology is, and how everything is based off and built on what came before.  I realize this is obvious, but sometimes you just need to be reminded.

There are all sorts of messages and lots of commentary in this book about our reliance on technology and how we often use it to escape from reality, and what our world might become if we continue burning through fossil fuels at the rate we do.  They are very interesting and make the book more meaningful but they are not different than what you'd read in any other dystopian novel about technology reliance.  So read the book for the fast pace, 80s references and cute romantic story about loving someone for her true self and not for her sexy online avatar.

PS - Don't forget to start brainstorming books you'd like to read for the A More Diverse Universe blog tour, coming November  15-17.