Category: Reviews

( #ReadyPlayerOne )

If you are a fan of 80’s nostalgia, MMRPGs, and straight up nerd culture I have a book for you. My editor at Best SF Books turned me on to “Ready Player One” after I wrote a review of “Reamde”. Both books utilize online role playing games as the back drop for their stories. While Reamde has a more serious tone, “Ready Player One” is a more light-hearted and fun read, it reminded me of a hightech upgrade of Willy Wonka.

The plot is set 50 years in the future where the environment is trashed and there are massive energy shortages. Most people have fallen below the poverty line and live in trailer parks that have been stacked vertically due to lack of space. Wade, the main character, is a teenager struggling to survive living in the trailer park. Author Earnest Cline gives Wade a “Harry Potter” back story: his parent’s are dead and he lives with an Aunt that doesn’t care about him. Wade escapes his horrid existence by logging into OASIS which is a massive online world. Most people live their entire lives inside of the OASIS system, Wade even goes to school there.

The inventor of OASIS died a few years before the start of the story. In his will, he announces a contest in the game system, with the winner getting all of his money (over 200 billion dollars) and control of the company that makes the OASIS game. There is another company called IOI, that has become extremely profitable offering services in OASIS, they want to win the contest and take control of the online world. Wade figures out the first clue putting him on the world’s radar and in IOI’s cross-hairs.

Overall, “Ready Player One” is a charming book that borrows a little from many different areas. The book feels familiar and Cline’s writing style is smooth and easy (I finished the book in 2 days without really trying). The story drags a bit in the middle (typical main character self-loathing which seems to be a requisite for modern books), but Cline moves past it before it becomes a problem. Also, due to the familiar feeling of the book, I never felt like the antagonists have a chance at winning which takes the punch out of the conflict, but honestly, after reading the first page you know Charlie is going to get the chocolate factory, you just want to know how.

“Ready Player One” is a fun book that celebrates 80’s culture and gaming in the package of an adventure. The story is like chocolate cake, I can’t think of anybody that won’t like it.

( #StephenKing )

I finished up my “holiday reading” choice last night around 3:00 AM. I had “11/22/63” by Stephen King sitting on the shelf for a month and decided it was time to knock it out. The story centers around a teacher that finds a time portal to 1958. He quickly decides to stick around in the past for a few years to stop the Kennedy assassination.

Once you accept the time portal as a plot device, the book falls into a steady pace. The first half sets up the main character (Jake) and how he operates in the past. King develops rules about time travel, essentially cosmic forces push back when someone attempts to alter time. For example if you are trying to stop someone from getting shot, the road you are taking may be blocked by an overturned truck. Jake also opts to take on a few smaller side missions, averting tragedies that happened to friends or children he read about. Failure means Jake would have to go back into the time portal which hits the reset button every time (so he has to do each thing over again and it becomes harder).

The book slows down considerably when Jake hits Texas. He establishes a life for himself and bunkers down for the three years while he waits for Oswald to arrive in Dallas. Life in small town Texas and the friendships Jake develops reads well, but when the plot shifts back to stopping Lee Harvey, something doesn’t feel right. The tone of the book never recovers. Without giving too much away, the cosmic forces start to push back and the crazy commences. King does such a good job foreshadowing these threads, they never come off as shocking. Since you know it is coming, it just feels like you are flipping pages until the next thing happens.

Without giving the big plot point away, Jake being in the past for 5 years changes things, which cause some “Back to the Future Part 2” kind of problem at the end of the story. King introduces characters/concepts at the end of the book that feel like they may be part of another King story, but I haven’t read it (King has a cameo featuring “It” characters in the first part of the book). He offers a little more information about the time portal which was nice, but unnecessary.

Even though the “11/22/63” drags in the middle, I liked this book. If for nothing else, King does a great job of painting life in the 1960s. My friends and I often sit around and talk about our zombie survival plans, I feel like people who grew up during the Kennedy era probably had similar conversations about “if you could go back in time, how would you stop the Kennedy assassination”. This is how Stephen King would do it – I can respect that.