Ready Player One ended being a much, much better book than one would assume at face value. On the surface, the story surrounds a gamer named Wade, as he attempts to make friends and find a hidden Easter egg treasure deep within the bowels of the largest multi-player game ever concocted, OASIS. But there are catches: the people he’s friends with are also competing for the prize; a huge conglomerate corporation is trying to steal it out from under them; and the only person who even knew where to find the keys to get to the tests to try to win the prize was the game’s mastermind, who started the contest in his last will and testament.
The prize? $2.4 billion and a controlling stake in his company.
Ready Player One actually tends to make the reader forget that they’re reading about a character playing a game, and when compared to the “real” world, it’s easy to see how that happens. By the point the story begins, Earth has been absolutely ravaged by war and food and fuel shortages, and has become little more than an apocalyptic wasteland where people have to scrape a living together to get by. This is the world OASIS was born into, and this is the world that gave it the distinction of being the biggest game in world history. And then the contest starts.
Cline has littered the book with references to and trivia of pop culture from the last thirty years, so reading the story is almost like an exciting trip through nostalgia. The characters are fun, the story’s engaging, and the stakes are high. Ready Player One becomes a page turner quickly, and definitely deserves the distinction.
Want to read Ready Player One? You can check it out at Hirsh! Just click the cover to be taken to the listing in the catalog. Happy reading!
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