Archive for January 7th, 2012|Daily archive page

On the plus side, I’m leveling up my Captcha skill while I do this. That’s a plus side, right?

@ironsoapJanuary 07, 2012 at 10:13AM

I guess I wasn’t the only person to try ordering @SanJoseSharks tickets today, huh?

@ironsoapJanuary 07, 2012 at 10:12AM

Ready Player One

Ready Player One

author: Ernest Cline
name: Paul
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2011
rating: 4
read at: 2012/01/06
date added: 2012/01/07
shelves: novel, science-fiction
review:
Ernest Cline‘s Ready Player One isn’t a perfect novel, and not one I would recommend to just anyone, but it is the most fun I’ve had reading in a very long time. I typically read with a sort of substrata of emotion, wherein I experience the humor, joy, sorrow, tragedy and sentimentality internally, not usually allowing my external person to reflect these shifts of mood. I consider a writer extraordinarily successful if they can break that crafted illusion and evoke such a strength of feeling that I cannot help but laugh or smile or scowl or cry. There isn’t much heavy heartbreak in Ready Player One, but there is enough unchecked glee—for a bookish nerd whose formative years were in the 1980s—present to plant an unyielding smile on my face through most of the book.

Ready Player One follows Wade Watts, an introverted orphan struggling with daily life in a future some thirty years on. An energy crisis has made the planet unstable and governments have practically collapsed, but the world has found escape in a mega-MMO called OASIS, which is so immersive, so all-encompasing that it has nearly replaced real life for many, if not most people. The creator of OASIS, the enigmatic James Halliday, passed away five years prior to the events in the book. As his final legacy, he coded an elaborate scavenger hunt into OASIS, consisting of three keys to be found, three gates to be opened, and three challenges to be overcome. The prize to the player who wins the contest: an easter egg which grants control of OASIS and the company behind it. Fame, fortune, power, all up for grabs. Wade is part of a group of dedicated egg hunters, known as gunters, who have dedicated themselves to trying to win the contest, but for five years no one has been able to even locate the first key, much less make any progress on the contest’s empty leaderboard.

One thing all the gunters know is that the contest is rooted in Halliday’s life, and his passions for 80s pop culture: movies, TV shows, music and most of all classic video games. Then, almost by accident, Wade finds the first key and becomes an instant celebrity when his name shows up on the leaderboard.

This book is a love letter to the children of a particular era. Atari-loving, Goonies-watching, Robotech-quoting, John Williams-humming, arcade-haunting kids and teens will see their youthful passions elevated here to a ridiculous canon wrapped inside a internet and tech-loving über-World of Warcraft framework that is practically ready-made for the current crop of post-social nerdlets. As a card-carrying member of this group, Ready Player One spoke to me like no book since Snow Crash.

Let me make one thing clear here, though: This is not speculative fiction of the cerebral order that authors like Neal Stephenson can conjure. This is less engineer-nerd manifesto as it is pop-culture-geek fairy tale. And that’s okay, because I think it means Ready Player One is more accessible to a broader audience that has grown to embrace the labels that once haunted them as opposed to existing in a marginalized niche. But the result of this is that while Stephenson seemed to be predicting the future, Cline is clearly writing for the present. Certain modern-day shout outs cement this notion, with references to YouTube and Wikipedia marring an otherwise standalone universe. It’s possible those services will continue to exist in some form in 35 years, but their inclusion and others like it seemed to drag me out of the novel’s world and back into my own unnecessarily.

The plotting is undeniably powerful, as this is a ridiculously compelling and readable book, but some emotional resonance (beyond the grin-fixating nostalgia and triumphant underdog victories) is bypassed in favor of the breakneck pace. A dramatic scene fairly early in the story, for example, indicates either a certain emotional callowness either on the part of Wade or Cline (it’s not clear which). The central emotional hook does manage to work despite this same threat looming over it, mostly by virtue of the characterization prowess on display, but there is potential for this to be an even more resonant book, perhaps even a more memorable one, if Cline had taken just a bit more time to nurture a couple of key interactions.

And overall this is the central difficulty I have in determining a final opinion on Ready Player One. A part of me wants to note that there is room for improvement and this isn’t quite the novel it ultimately could have been. But there is another, much larger, part of me that just wants to hug this book and let it wash over me again with its conjurations of saturday morning cartoons absorbed over giant bowls of cereal, surrounded by armies of action figures and endless days exploring fantastic digital worlds drawn to my television by a rotating cast of game consoles. What ultimately seals the final analysis is that I realize I can’t recommend this book to just anyone. People like my wife, who shared the time period but had dramatically different childhood experiences, may enjoy the book on a base level but they won’t appreciate it like I did. My parents, also, are unlikely to find the particular marvel that Ready Player One represents for a subset of readers.

But my childhood friends, my brother, people I used to sit with on schoolyards and park swings and play “what if,” this is the culmination of all that crossover, culture-drenched daydreaming. And for those it is intended, it is triumphant. For everyone else, I suspect it is a fun ride, perhaps a touch trite, but still worth a chapter or two just to see if you can get into the rhythm. If your experience mirrored mine, this is a hands-down, five-star, gotta-read-it-now novel. For everyone else, I’d say it’s a solid and joyful celebration of a particular time period framed in a light morality tale. I’m content in the end to split the difference and note that more than most books, your individual mileage on this one, may vary.

from Paul's bookshelf: readJanuary 07, 2012 at 04:01AM

Thanks for all the kind birthday wishes. I spent the day home sick, which was kind of a bummer, but I got to hang out with my two best girls, so it ended up being pretty great after all.

from Paul Hamilton — January 07, 2012 at 04:35AM

“Oh, hi there, Giant Untied Shoe!”

@ironsoapJanuary 06, 2012 at 10:05PM

My two year-old daughter pronounces “soup” like “poop.” It makes for some very unsettling lunch requests.

@ironsoapJanuary 06, 2012 at 09:53PM