"Ready Player One" ~ Ernest Cline

"Ready Player One" is a recommendation from a favorite author's blog.  It is great.  Seriously great for a first novel.  The setting is 2044 and the world has just continued to get worse and worse.  The majority of the world works, plays and "lives" in a type of virtual reality know as OASIS.  OASIS is owned and designed by James Halliday.  The book opens with his death and his fortune, including OASIS, going up for grabs to the first person who can solve his riddles and find the "Easter Egg" he has hidden in the game.

Our main character is Wade Watts an overweight, poor, 17 year-old who is far more comfortable as his avatar Parzival than as real life Wade.  Wade is a "ghunter" and has been searching for the egg, along with everyone else, for the last five years.  This has lead him, and the world, to become obsessed with the 1980's, the decade that Halliday was a teenager.  Wade is convinced that the clues are somewhere in the minutia of "Dungeons and Dragons", "Pac-man", "Family Ties", and "Transformers" and he's right. 

There is adventure, some romance, and some coming of age all rolled into one.  One of the oddest bits for me is the 80's pop / geek culture.  I was a teenager in the 80's and I didn't get half the references.  On the other hand, they are explained with such reverence that I feel like I missed out on some really cool stuff.  And I was there. Cline also explores the theme of loneliness and the ability to form lasting relationships with people we haven't physically met.  The terror of moving beyond the virtual world where you can present yourself as anything you want, to the physical reality of this is who I really am. He has some great arguments for both sides of the coin. 

I just really liked this book.  The writing was good and I never felt bogged down.  The action had nice tension and the final battle was amazing and just had me grinning through the whole thing.  I cared what happened to Wade, Aech, and Art3mis. Both the 80's flashbacks and the future OASIS fit together perfectly in way that shouldn't have worked but does.  I want to go the the OASIS and visit planet "Ready Player One".  Well, right after I'm done with the Wedonverse sector.