Ready Player One

A little while ago I went downtown to play boardgames with Duncan and Sara. While waiting in line at Hero Burger Duncan told me about a book he saw about a treasure hunt where you had to play Joust at some point. It sounded interesting but faded from my mind in short order. I was in the middle of reading the 5th book in the Game of Thrones after which I had Whipping Girl to read. And then I got to Final Fantasy III and stopped reading on the bus while I played that.

Tuesday I finished off Whipping Girl and had run out of stuff to read on my Kobo. So I went on a minor shopping spree in the Kobo store. I downloaded a bunch of old books that are free (Sherlock Holmes, Alice in Wonderland, The Art of War, Around the World in 80 Days, Moby Dick) and bought a book I'd heard good things about: World War Z. I did a google search for 'novel with Joust' and a couple entries down the list was an article about Ernest Cline playing Joust and talking about his novel Ready Player One. So I bought it, too.

Wednesday I started reading it and Thursday night I'd finished it off. I don't actually know how long it is (one of the 'features' of using an e-reader is every book looks to be the same size) but the book definitely had a hold of me and wouldn't let me do anything else except keep reading. It's got the perfect treasure hunt themes going on. Some puzzles I worked out before the characters, some I worked out incorrectly, and others I just had to keep reading to find out what was going on.

The basic idea to the book is it's the future and people can jack into a virtual reality MMO. The rich dude who coded the MMO dies and leaves his vast fortune to whoever can solve his treasure hunt within the MMO. He hid all the clues and puzzles in stuff he really liked from his youth which just happened to be the 80s. So a lot of the book is constant nostalgic throwbacks to movies, games, television, and music from the 80s.

I'm a big fan of the 80s so if that's all it was I'd probably still enjoy reading it. But the hunt and the story surrounding it are also gripping. It reminded me a lot of the first Hunger Games book with a lot of reveling in the 80s thrown in.

At the end the author mentions how he hopes people will want to explore some of these games and movies from the 80s as a result of reading the book. So today I went searching for Zork which is a game I've never had a chance to play. It turns out the publisher actually released the first three Zork games for free, so I downloaded the first one and have already gotten stuck. Boo!

At any rate, you need to go read this book. Go!