Ready Player 1

There is a quote on the front of this book from the Huffington Post: Delightful! an adult Harry Potter.

I would never call this book delightful. It was suspenseful, imaginative, clever but not delightful. Harry Potter is a story about love, self sacrifice, friendship, and defeating an evil dictator. This book also contains elements of those things. It's the setting of the two novels that makes one delightful and the other vaguely creepy. At times while reading, I felt the same queasy feeling I had when I read the Handmaid's Tale.

The book takes place in a video game / virtual world called the OASIS.  The real world is a miserable, hopeless place that everyone wants to escape because they are mostly destitute due to living under a fascist government.

The creator of the OASIS dies. He has no heirs or friends and lived a very isolated existence because (people assume) he had Asperger's.. and he was a mad genius and billionaire because of the world he created. He decides to give his company and his billions to the person who can win the game he created within the OASIS.

The book's author is clearly passionate about video games. He creates a fantastic virtual world -- far more creative than anything you could experience in the real world.. like Disneyland would be super dull in comparison.  At the end of the book there are a few sentences of dialog between characters about the fact that the real world is a better place to be .. escaping is not a good idea. This would be like reading a book about people who have the best time of their lives all while high and then at the end, someone says, you know, drugs aren't good.

The best part of the book were all the obscure references to pop culture in the 80's.  Fun book.. I just hope that future does not become reality.