Ready Player One

Title: Ready Player One
Author: Ernest Cline
Genre: Science Fiction
Publisher: Crown
Publication date: August 2011

Around the (second) time that I found myself carrying this book into the shower, I realized that I had a problem. I could not stop reading this book. Could. Not. Stop.

When I was in ninth grade, I read ENDER'S GAME. It wasn't the first science fiction novel I'd ever read, but it changed the way I thought about things. I got so engrossed in Ender's world that I expected to be living in it when I put my book down. (Sadly, this was not the case. I was still in a public high school in Syracuse, New York, and the kids behind me in study hall were throwing Cheetos at the back of my head.)

READY PLAYER ONE was like another ENDER'S GAME for me. It sucked me in on the first page and didn't spit me out until the last.

Wade Watts, like most people in the year 2044, lives most of his life in a simulated world called the OASIS. He's a gunter, one of thousands of people who have dedicated themselves to solving a series of challenges to find a massive fortune hidden within the game. Outside of OASIS, he is a poor, overweight, parentless teenager. Inside of the game, he is anonymous. Until he solves the first challenge.

Ernest Cline is a screenwriter, and it shows. Every scene in READY PLAYER ONE reads like a 3-D movie with surround sound and smell-o-vision. Whenever I put the book down it was like I'd paused the movie, but I could still see it out of the corner of my eye. It was impossible to get anything done because I was still waiting to see what would happen to Wade next.

Fans of Cory Doctorow will go CRAZY over this amazing debut. In fact, this book will quickly become Canon for nerds everywhere.