Ready, Player, Go!

We've been sharing our book reviews with the Donnybrook Writing Academy, which is so exciting. This month, it's Ready Player One. We're giving them a new spin to work on that site, so even if you already read our review of the book on this blog, you still might want to check out the review over there.

Meeting Notes: Ready Player One

 

December's book club was quite fun. We met at Kayla's to discuss Ready Player One, to eat delicious food, and to exchange gifts. In fact, it was pretty much a perfect night until we left the house.

Kayla made a mushroom gruyere tart, kale salad, and rosemary chocolate chip shortbread. To drink, she mixed rosemary infused vodka with pear juice, blackberry Izzie, and soda water. Let me just say, it was really, really good. This drink needs a name. Ideas? We listened to a Ready Player One playlist full of fun eighties music- thanks, Kara!

 

Video Discussions:

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And here's a written summary of our discussion (in case you are too busy for videos):

SPOILER ALERT!! Do not read on unless you're okay with spoilers.

Only two of us finished Ready Player One in its entirety. It wasn't the book itself that kept us from completing it; it was the craziness of the holiday season and the length of the book. I actually sped through to the end the day after book club. Ready Player One is a lot of fun. It's replete with references to Eighties pop culture and geek culture. We knew we were missing a lot of the allusions, but what we caught added both playfulness and the depth to the read. It's also an adventure story above all else and full of excitement and suspense as a result. Ready Player One is set in 2044, and environmental destruction has depleted the earth's resources and made life almost unbearable. Just as the earth was falling apart, a programming genius named Halliday invented a virtual reality called Oasis in which almost all humans now live, work, and play. Before he died, Halliday hid the rights to his vast fortune within the game. He created three keys and three gates, and the last leads to his billions. A 19-year-old boy named Wade with a tragic life is the first person to discover the copper key, which propels him into an intense race to complete the quest before an evil corporation or other "egg hunters" do. Besides being entertaining, the book hints at a lot of very interesting questions about the nature of reality, both in terms of physical versus virtual realities and the reality of the past versus our memories of it. Some of us thought that the author could have explored these issues a little more deeply. For instance, how did it really affect the people in that society to live almost entirely online? Were their prisoners of their own making, or did someone or something entrap them in this virtual world? Or contrarily, is a virtual reality stigmatized but really no worse than the "real" world? Along those lines, we all liked that the author wasn't heavy handed with his criticisms of Oasis and in fact pointed out some positives of it. 

Here is one of my favorite paragraphs from the book, which takes place as Wade is walking through a recreation of Halliday's childhood home within Oasis: "Looking around, I wondered why Halliday, who always claimed to have had a miserable childhood, had later become so nostalgic for it. I knew that if and when I finally escaped from the stacks, I'd never look back. And I definitely wouldn't create a detailed simulation of the place." I liked it because it reminded me of the nostagia the book has for the Eighties and gets at that weird disconnect between the reality of the past and our memories of it and how we can never relive the reality of the past. As Courtney pointed out, it's also connected to the idea of how a physical world differs from a virtual reality. A virtual world, like a dream or a memory, is better than the real thing in a lot of ways because we have more control over it and we can make it what we want it to be, but, maybe contradictorily, you can't affect a whole lot of change on a fake world. 

-Bess

Bookish Gift Guide

Gift ideas for the bookworm in your life.

1.  Are you reading this yet?????

2.  Pretty Kate Spade Kindle cover

3.  Sweet birdie bookmarks

4.  Smiths book cover poster (amazing!)

5. Bookshelf

Next Pick!

Kayla announces December's book choice. I am making all kinds of strange faces in the background. I didn't realize I was so expressive...

Next pick is Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. For lazier parties, I've pasted the Goodreads summary below.

It’s the year 2044, and the real world is an ugly place. 

Like most of humanity, Wade Watts escapes his grim surroundings by spending his waking hours jacked into the OASIS, a sprawling virtual utopia that lets you be anything you want to be, a place where you can live and play and fall in love on any of ten thousand planets. 

And like most of humanity, Wade dreams of being the one to discover the ultimate lottery ticket that lies concealed within this virtual world. For somewhere inside this giant networked playground, OASIS creator James Halliday has hidden a series of fiendish puzzles that will yield massive fortune—and remarkable power—to whoever can unlock them.   

For years, millions have struggled fruitlessly to attain this prize, knowing only that Halliday’s riddles are based in the pop culture he loved—that of the late twentieth century. And for years, millions have found in this quest another means of escape, retreating into happy, obsessive study of Halliday’s icons. Like many of his contemporaries, Wade is as comfortable debating the finer points of John Hughes’s oeuvre, playing Pac-Man, or reciting Devo lyrics as he is scrounging power to run his OASIS rig.

And then Wade stumbles upon the first puzzle.

Suddenly the whole world is watching, and thousands of competitors join the hunt—among them certain powerful players who are willing to commit very real murder to beat Wade to this prize. Now the only way for Wade to survive and preserve everything he knows is to win. But to do so, he may have to leave behind his oh-so-perfect virtual existence and face up to life—and love—in the real world he’s always been so desperate to escape. 
 
A world at stake.
A quest for the ultimate prize.
Are you ready?