Welcome back to the book of the week! Took a couple of weeks of, mainly due to real life being an absolute and total nightmare. Now, things are settling down and I'm getting things back up and running! This week's book is one that I've read on my Kindle and listened to in audio, because I absolutely love it. It's narrated by Wil Wheaton, an actor and geek that I absolutely LOVE!
Ready Player One
Ernest Cline
If you are a child of the 80s, lover of video games, and pop culture in general - this book is absolutely the book for you! It's stunning and by far one of my favorite reads! I highly recommend this book, and I'm even including a guest review which will hopefully inspire you to pick up this book - no matter what format!
Guest Reviewer: C. S. McClendon
Review:Ready Player One
In 2011, Ernest Cline broke on to the scene with his first novel. Yes, I know I am a bit late on the band wagon, but having only just discovered the audio you'll have to cut me a little slack. I have now read the book four times, most of those back to back. I find Cline's writing refreshing, and easy to slip into, particularly for someone who, like me, depends so heavily on various audio formats.
The book reads almost as if it was meant to be an audio track. When Cine mentions a song, or t he sound track of a particular game (both liberally salted throughout the book) I can all but hear the sounds of the 80's, the decade when Both Cline and I did most of our growing up. This book, for a that it is a work of Science Fiction, set in the not so distant year of 2044, does a fantastic job of transporting the reader back to the 1980's, and making us feel a surge of nostalgia for those lost years
I love to read dystopian fiction. It is a favorite genre of mine, from 1984 to the Hunger Games series. I have read wonderful dystopia, as well as having fought my way through books of the genre that make me feel like I have just spent a week reading stereo instructions. Ernest Cline, manages to create a world that I both love and fear. I can see us as a race, landing ourselves in the dark, rusty jungle of the Portland Avenue stacks if we aren't very careful. Cline has brought us a world that could easily be waiting just around any corner.
***
If you spend any significant time reading audio books, then you know as well as I do that the writer is only one part of the puzzle. The right narrator can take even a bad book, and lift it up out of the mud to make it enjoyable. On the other side of that same coin, a poor narrator, one who isn't on his game, can take even the best story, and scare a reader off of it for good.
In this performance of Ready Player One, Wil Wheaton, who is a child of the 80's himself most certainly brings his A game. From the first few words, the reader, (or listener in this case) is able to hear the voice of Wade Owen Watts. With slight changes in his inflection, and a skilled actor's ear for accents and dialect, Wheaton brings to life the full cast of Cline's characters, both the heroes we want to cheer for, and those few oily villains we want to see take a shot to the back of the head.
Working together, Ernest Cline and Wil Wheaton bring the reader a work of cyber-punk art that every audiophile's collection will be enriched by.
***
I won't lie. This story, for all that I was several years late in finding it, has very quickly become one of my favorites. You can tell by the fact that I have already reed it several times over. I knew within the first half hour of this nearly sixteen hour work of audio dystopia that it was going to be one that I was going to have trouble putting down, even when it was time to go to bed at night.
From the very first pages, I knew that Wade Watts was a kid just like the awkward geek that I was, and in a lot of ways, still am. As a member of the 99%, Wade finds himself in a game that quickly turns into a fight not only for his own future, but for the future of the world as he knows it. Can he turn a single lucky break into a victory against the evil minions of I.O.I, the Sixers, who have shown themselves more than willing to stop at nothing to win, and who are not afraid to kill to win? Can he save both his world and his friends? These are only some of the questions we hope to find answers to as we draw toward the end of the game whose winner will have the power to change the world forever. Will Wade and his friends find a way to win the game? Will they all survive to see the end? Nothing is certain. It is all up for grabs, and if you are like me, you will find yourself racing to the end to find the answers.
So I leave you with a question of my own.... Are you Ready, Player One?
