Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline is such a fun and entertaining book! My husband doesn’t enjoy reading as much as I do, but I’ve started checking out non-fiction audiobooks that relate to his interests on Overdrive*. We listen to them on road trips and it has been such a great way to share my hobby with him. As soon as I read the blurb on the cover of Ready Player One (Matrix meets Willy Wonka, video games, 80s nostalgia and virtual worlds), I knew it would be the perfect fiction book to start with. The best part of this book was listening to it together and seeing how much he enjoyed it! He loved it so much that we listened to the last three hours at home, instead of waiting for our next trip!

The year is 2044 and the entire world is plagued by poverty and unemployment. The real world is in such bad shape that people are living a majority of their lives in the OASIS, a virtual utopia. The OASIS even contains an educational system. When the the eccentric, 1980s-obsessed creator of the OASIS James Halliday dies, he leaves behind a video message revealing that he will leave ownership of the OASIS and his entire multi-billion dollar fortune to the first person who can solve the series of challenges he has left hidden within the massive virtual world. Some people devote their entire lives to poring over 1980s culture, in order to find some hint to decipher Halliday’s cryptic clue and locate the first challenge. Everyone is stumped! Five years after Halliday’s death, orphaned high school senior Wade Watts finds and beats the first challenge and the competition goes into overdrive!

The story is told in first person, from Wade’s point of view. The writing is really straight forward and easy to read. The best parts were the scenes inside the the virtual utopia of the OASIS. The descriptions were so vivid that I kept forgetting that much of it was set in a virtual world rather than a real, fantastical world. I was born in 1982 and a bulk of my pop culture memory relates to the 1990s, so I wasn’t overly familiar with 100% of the references. Cline does a good job of giving an overview of the most important mentions, so being born in the 1990s or 2000s shouldn’t be a hindrance to reading this book. The challenges were based off 1980s video games and it was fun to see what challenge Cline would concoct next! The action was well-paced and I was always eager to start the next chapter. Wil Wheaton did a fantastic job with the voices and transitioned flawlessly between characters. I think I enjoyed this story more as an audiobook, than I would have in written form.

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The negatives didn’t detract from my overall positive feelings of the book. There are a lot of exhausting info dumps, especially in the beginning. It felt like there was some master checklist of 80s geek culture and the author wanted to mention them all! The book was so focused on 80s culture that it would throw me off when general geek culture from other decades was mentioned. Of course no decade or generation exists in a vacuum, so that is more my issue than Cline’s. The biggest issue for me was that things seem consistently go well for Wade and he gets out more than a few dilemmas with some really good luck, particularly during his crazy plan at the end. The story could have benefited from more tension at points.

The more books I read, the harder it is to read without a super critical eye. Ready Player One was such fun and it reminded me of my love of reading for reading’s sake. I’m looking forward to the movie and Cline’s next book! I would recommend it for anyone who is looking for a fun “popcorn” read and a little escapism. It would also be a great book to recommend to a friend who isn’t a big reader.

The Day We Met by Rowan Coleman

Free-spirited Claire Armstrong is diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s Disease when she is 43 years old. Her mom Ruth moves into Claire’s house to help watch over her and Claire is increasingly frustrated as her slow memory deterioration causes her to lose her independence. During one of Claire’s escapes, she meets a handsome stranger and she begins to question her relationship with her husband Greg, who she has already begun to forget. Claire’s 21-year-old daughter Caitlyn returns home from college with secrets and conflicts of her own.

The story is told from the alternating first person perspectives of Claire and Caitlyn.To help Claire deal with her diagnosis and preserve some of her memories for her daughters, especially 3-year-old Esther, her husband gives her a journal to record her memories. The entire family ends up attaching souvenirs and writing memories about Claire. The process is deeply cathartic for them. Entries from the memory book are interspersed throughout the book, including entries from Ruth and Greg.

It is impossible for me to review this book without comparing it to Still Alice, which I loved. An educator in a relevant field struck with early onset Alzheimer’s Disease. Alice and Claire both have nonconformist daughters who are forced to “mature” when their mother is diagnosed with a terminal disease. Both women end up lost in their hometown in the very beginning. Love endures is the main theme. Introducing a character named Alice at the end didn’t help break the connection either! At times I thought, “Haven’t I read this before?”

This book could have benefited from introducing us to Claire before her diagnosis. We get see snippets of pre-AD Claire through the memory book, but those instances are through a nostalgic lens. I was mostly interested in the relationships between Claire and her family, but the book was dominated by Caitlyn’s side plot. Most of the parts that annoyed me involved Caitlyn’s story: Claire’s convenient lucidity to move the plot forward, Caitlyn’s convenient meeting with the perfect boy and a climatic confrontation at the professor’s home that was a little too absurd and unrealistic for me. The author really tried too cram in too many conflicts into this book, when Claire’s story was interesting enough on its own.
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[spoiler]I suspected Ryan’s true identity, but she had such a visceral negative reaction to Greg inside the house. I wasn’t sure if it was realistic for her to consistently recognize him as a completely different person outside the house.[/spoiler] Brains are weird! Even though it was sweet, the ending was a little too tidy. All the characters sounded the same.

I did like the memory book concept. The closeness of the family and the relationships between the individual family members were the parts that interested me most. Claire’s desperation to have a friend that still sees her as herself and not a mentally ill person rang true, as did her worries about her daughter’s futures and her fears that her three year old daughter Esther would forget her. As Claire’s mental abilities regressed, her relationship with Esther was especially interesting. There was a poignant moment where Claire could not read a book to Esther and Esther had to explain the story to her instead. Greg’s last entry in the memory book is heartbreaking. I wish we could have seen more from his perspective, because we could really see him struggling in the background.

Despite the subject matter, this book mostly has the same light mood as The Rosie Project, Big Little Lies or One Plus One. This book doesn’t pack quite the same emotional punch as Still Alice or Me Before You, but I do see the appeal. Readers of Liane Moriarty and Jojo Moyes may enjoy this book.