Whoa, bet you weren't expecting ME to be doing a book review. That's right, Austin is doing a book review. A review for a book that Loz ever so gently FORCED ME TO READ. I'm sure anyone who reads our blog knows how that was gonna work out.
ANYWAYS, this review is for the book "Ready Player One". Ernest Cline's first book ever, apparently. And let me say, it's a damn good one at that. It has it's cheesy moments, and a bit easy to predict at times, but really, there were plenty of times it through me through a loop. Maybe that's just because I don't read books as often as the normal book reader, buuuut, I can still appreciate a good book quite a lot. Now, down to the nitty gritty. This book follows the life of one Wade Watts, but you'll come to know him as Prazival. This book has plenty, and do I mean PLENTY of references. As an avid gamer, and all around computer... uh, nerd, I caught quite a lot of these homages. One of these actually REALLY caught me off guard, being a reference to a TV show (Anime, but let's not get into that), that really helped me deal with a lot of stress in my childhood, "Cowboy Bebop". I was beyond pleasantly surprised. One downside to this writing style became apparent to me RIGHT away, and it was painfully obvious at that. Since this is so full of references, some of them are very out of place.
This book was written in 2011, and I am reading this in 2015. It may not seem like such a big deal, but having to read the characters SERIOUSLY calling each other "noobs" as an insult was actually causing me to cringe so much that it almost made me sick. Talk about second hand embarrassment in the absolute worst way. Though, but no means does this ruin the book, it just kinda takes away a bit of the excitement behind it for me, knowing that with these jokes, the book is dating itself, even though its set in the future. Perhaps this can be explained in the same way that the rest of the book is explained in that since there was a resurfacing of interest in the 80's and 90's because of the book's most important character, James Halliday, but these terms really didn't even make sense in THAT time period either. That's just me being nit picky though, I imagine. Now, throughout this book, Prazival will come to know many people, and make friends with them. One of which he has been friends with for ages, named Aceh (Pronounced "H"), whom is a very close friend indeed. Prazvial is just a lowly level 3, and he can't raise his level easily, considering it cost money to even teleport around the worlds, and he certainly doesn't have the money. In his world, he is a poor very low class citizen.
The world is in absolute chaos, murder and robbery become the norm. The world's resources are depleting too fast, and now there isn't much left, and all that is truly left for the world in the way of escapism is the OASIS. The OASIS is a universal gaming VR system created by Halliday, and the world basically worshiped him because of this. It provided the one thing people needed most, a way to forget about the troubles of the horrible world they live in. I don't want to get too much into the story, I like to keep my reviews as spoiler free as possible, but I will say the story itself, while nothing especially NEW, was very well written, and I quite enjoyed it. The journey it took me on was well worth the read, and I truly wish there was some sort of sequel to this, even though it wrapped up rather nicely, but there were plenty of questions I wanted answered. For a writer's first book, this is very good, and I recommend it to anyone who enjoys games, older movies, TV shows, even a bit of sci-fi or fantasy.
I rate this book 4.3 tasty sandwiches out of 5.
Thanks for reading!
Oh, and I accidentally spilled water onto my book like a fucking idiot, right before I finished it. So, I rated my stupidity 10/10, as well.
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