Ready Player One — Ernest Cline

“All of the intervening layers slipped away, and I lost myself in the game within the game.”

People is now loosing themselves on virtual worlds. But who assure us that life is not like a virtual world.

Synopsis:

In the year 2045, reality is an ugly place. The only time teenage Wade Watts really feels alive is when he's jacked into the virtual utopia known as the OASIS. Wade's devoted his life to studying the puzzles hidden within this world's digital confines, puzzles that are based on their creator's obsession with the pop culture of decades past and that promise massive power and fortune to whoever can unlock them. When Wade stumbles upon the first clue, he finds himself beset by players willing to kill to take this ultimate prize. The race is on, and if Wade's going to survive, he'll have to win—and confront the real world he's always been so desperate to escape.

Opinion:

Honestly, I decided to read this book because the movie is just coming up. And I would say that it is as all people said it would be. It is a world where people had two lifes, the real and the virtual one, and most of real lifes sucks.

The world has become an ugly place cause by pollution and energetic problems; yes, right where we are going right now. As people can't travel long distances because there is no more fuel, them almost everyone works from home. And homes are also horrible, because everyone is so dam poor that now little apartments are seem like mansions for rich people.

This last, is what I most loved of the book. All the world was so well described that I started thinking it was real. And let me tell you that all the virtual world and all the references were so well described that, even knowing nothing about 80’s, I could understand everything.

So if it was such an amazing book, why didn’t I give it 5 stars? Well, I guess everything on the story was perfect but something was missing, that stuff all 5-stars-books have: the feeling when the book change your way of thinking or it just make you feel something, even if it is just a little. Or maybe it was because I couldn’t connect with Wade, I am not that into video-games. 

At the end I would say I could feel more sympathy for the decadent world and how we are getting closer to it. And how people is now loosing themselves on virtual worlds. Sometimes I believe that is not that bad, who assure us that life is not like a video game.

Quotes:

“The facts were right there waiting for me, hidden in old books written by people who weren’t afraid to be honest. Artists and scientist and philosophers and poets, many of them long dead. As I read the words they’d left behind, I finally began to get a grip on the situation. My situation. Our situation. What most people referred to as «the human condition».”

“I knew right away that I’d found something of immeasurable value: privacy.”

“At this school, the only real weapons were words, so I’d become skilled at wielding them.”

“All of the intervening layers slipped away, and I lost myself in the game within the game.”

“I was in love with her. I could feel it, deep in the soft chewy caramel center of my being.”

“Helpful Helpdesk Inc. took millions of calls a day, from all over the world. Twenty-four seven, three sixty-five. One angry, befuddled cretin after another. There was no downtime between calls, because there were always several hundred morons in the call queue, all of them willing to wait on hold for hours to have a tech rep hold their hand and fix their problem. Why bother looking up the solution online? Why try to figure the problem out on your own when you could have someone else do your thinking for you?”

“If anything, the face I saw in the photo seem even more beautiful to me than that of her avatar, because I knew this one was real.”

“I was afraid, for all of my life. Right up until I knew it was ending. That was when I realized as terrifying and painful as reality can be, it’s also the only place where you can find true happiness. Because reality is real.”

“She leaned over and kissed me. It felt just like all those songs and poems had promised it would. It felt wonderful. Like being struck by lightning.”

Score (4.5/5)