Ready Player One » Review

• Are you obsessed with video games? If you are, you need no other inducement to read Ernest Cline's Ready Player One.  


• So-so on video games?  You should still read the book; you'll find your appreciation gives you a bit of a boost in getting into the story.


• You don't care about gaming?  I don't care about sports featuring balls or small discs, but I don't hold that against the various athletic characters in books I read.


• You HATE video games? Maybe you should read Ready Player One and get a fully-fleshed perspective on your stance.

In case it isn't obvious yet, I'm recommending Ready Player One for everyone to read, especially because — and this is my trump card — the movie is coming out in a year or two and it is directed by Stephen Spielberg. Just sayin', don't you want to be the wise person who read the book before the hype becomes a fever pitch?  I know I did.

Sometimes staying up-to-date with literary culture can be a chore, the kind that one takes to with grim determination because the results, if not the process, are known to be desirable.  Take A Little Life, which was a huge book on the literary scene this year.  I intend to read A Little Life in order to be a better informed reader and because I'm curious, but judging by the cover, featuring a young man pressing his face with a clawed hand, wearing a clench-eyed look of anguish on his face, someone is going to have a long, drawn-out downfall in this book and probably die of AIDS or Gut Cancer, or complications ensuing from mental illnesses like schizophrenia and consumptive malaise.

All of this is to say that, on the other hand, reading Ready Player One for cultural purposes was like drinking a can of soda — there was a wonderful pop/crack and then a satisfying guzzle with lots of fizz.

That can be my blurb: "Ready Player One was a satisfying guzzle with lots of fizz." — Quest Reviews

Speaking of blurbs...one of the many accolades on the cover of Ready Player One tells us that we will be reading, "A GROWN-UP'S HARRY POTTER!" This really says something about the confusion around this book's genre.  I have found this book in the Fiction section and the Science Fiction section in bookstores, (the labels on the book read "Fiction — Science Fiction — Adventure." But by a few rights, Ready Player One should be YA.  Wade Watts, our main character, is 18 when the book begins and our chief supporting characters are barely older.  A friend of mine claims the book is "younger" than typical Science Fiction.  But the book is heftier than typical YA books as well, in both content and concept...

When in doubt, get scientific. The AR (Accelerated Reading) Score, used by schools and libraries, ranks Ready Player One as a 6.7, using the ATOS formula. A typical YA book ranks at a 5.  So, Ready Player One ranks at a higher reader difficulty and maturity than your average YA.  But this isn't to say that Ready Player One surpasses all YA.  Just for example, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows has an AR score of 6.9.  The Golden Compass is a 7.1.

All of this displacement is very interesting to me, and I could go on at even greater length, but what it comes down to is that Ready Player One can be enjoyed by many ages and readers.

But what about the actual content of the book?  The premise is this — that in 2012, an advanced virtual reality gaming console was invented that basically became the new internet; now, in 2044, the OASIS is a crucial aspect of modern life and many people escape the worsening effects of climate change and the repercussions of the Energy Crisis by making lives in virtual space.  Our protagonist, Wade Watts, has used the OASIS for years to educate himself.  He dreams of one day escaping from the "stacks" — the vertical, urban trailer park where he lives in poverty. He even has a plan to make hundreds of billions.  For he, like many thousands of OASIS players, is a 'gunter,' a person obsessed with finding the prize-winning Easter Egg left behind by the deceased creator of the OASIS.

The story is difficult to put down, due to Cline's winning combination of premise, plot, pace, and stakes.  All of these attributes were solid, especially the pace and stakes.  Where I think Cline stumbled was in characterization.  Wade was a fine main character.  He was someone to root for, even though he wasn't always admirable.  But the supporting cast needed some development.  Wade, as a paranoid anti-social, has his reasons for keeping people at a distance, but our narrator is an older, wiser Wade, speaking from the past tense.  He has the virtue of hindsight and should give us a clearer understanding of peripheral characters.

Also needing work is another element tied to characterization — dialogue!  Each line of dialogue in a book says something important about a character.  It's a powerful tool and helps to shape constructs into believable and understandable people.  Ernest Cline failed to hit the nail with the hammer on this point.  While reading, I often saw conversations centering on juvenile and inessential topics, or lines of speech that were dime-for-a-dozen and gave no insight into the speaker's inner workings.  This was something I noticed again and again, and felt sore over.

So, Ready Player One isn't a perfect book.  But it is a really good one.  It is a book that I'm glad I bought (without reading it first!) and that I'm looking forward to gifting people with. If you're looking around for something to read, why not give this book a play-through?

 

I'll Meet You There Review

My anticipation for this book was really high, despite my dislike for Demetrios' recent novels, Exquisite Captive and Something Real.  I think the concept of a contemporary romance, filthied by such extreme issues as poverty and amputation caught my interest, frankly.  I'm past the point of my life where I find Dessen-caliber contemporaries compelling — I need a little more grit to muster up my enjoyment, as off-kilter as that sounds.

Additionally, the early favorable reviews of I'll Meet You There had me really excited.  I pre-ordered the book on Amazon, and when I woke up at 1am the morning of the book's release day, I grabbed my kindle from my bedside table, and read the entire book before falling back to sleep.

I'm rating I'll Meet You There at 3 stars, because the book kept my interest so well. It was well written.  I didn't roll my eyes at any egregiously stupid parts, as I'm doing more and more with YA books these days (to my dismay).  I did, however, frown a lot while reading this novel.  Let me explain...

Although I've read a lot of reviews that note how I'll Meet You There has a slow-to-progress romance, that the romantic element of the book is more of a side note, I'm of the opinion that the book is a flat-out romance, no doubt about it.

I have no problem with this.  I love romances.  However, that means that Josh Mitchell, our male protagonist, is technically a romantic hero.  And Josh Mitchell is a, um, different romantic hero than I'm accustomed to.

Normally, this would be outstanding.  There's a lot of discussion out there about how characters in the romance genre are cliched up the wazoo.  So any diversions from tired tropes are good.  It's great when characters are recognizable as flesh-and-blood people.  Josh Mitchell is a recognizable human character.  I know a ton of douchebags just like him.

Seriously, this character that Demetrios has served to us, is a dick.  The first time readers meet Josh, he calls one the heroine's friends a faggot.  Not okay!  Although Josh makes an apology later (although to the heroine, not to the person he actually, you know, was a homophobic asshole to) he makes lots of douche-bro, meathead faux pas along our romantic journey with him.  Like an emotional imbecile, he repeatedly calls himself a pussy for experiencing PTSD symptoms. He has those nude-girl silhouette bumper stickers on his truck like a big, panting neanderthal. His favorite outlet of frustration is to throw beer bottles out of his truck window at abandoned gas stations like some sort of unimaginative goon.  I could go on, but I won't.

So my problem with I'll Meet You There is that, although Josh Mitchell is representative of many young men, he didn't light my fire.  At all.  For a romance, that's a deathstroke.

So, Something Real, Exquisite Captive, and I'll Meet You There. That's three strikes.  Unless future Demetrios books get utter raves, I'm going to pass on this author's works.

The Walled City Review

Desperation practically ekes out of Ryan Graudin's The Walled City.  These are characters gambling with enormous stakes — much more dire than simply staying alive.  Jin, Mei Yee, and Dai are dangling above the precipice of human agony. 

Jin Ling lives in Hak Nam Walled City of her own volition, surviving by stealing food and necessities, and running like hell. She is also searching for her sister, sold, by their father years before, to a drug lord.

Mei Yee, forced into sex work, lives caged in a brothel, under constant threat. Mei Yee has no other option but to sit, stagnant, in her prison, and let waves of horror and misery wash over her.

Dai cannot bring himself to set foot outside of the Walled City.  He is trying desperately to free himself from a cage of his own making, and he must enlist Jin Ling's talents to do so, by compromising the drug lord Longwai.

A note on the book's setting... Based off of Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong, Graudin's Hak Nam Walled City is a gritty, compelling backdrop.   Like its real world inspiration, Hak Nam is a re-purposed fort adjacent to a larger metropolis, turned into an over-packed mess of people stacked up on top of each other. It's a cluster of anarchy — full of gang activity, drug running, and human trafficking.  In regards to time and place — it was a little confusing.  It's my deduction that The Walled City is set an indeterminate Asian country, during an indeterminate period of modernity.

At this point, after detailing the characters and setting, it might seem like I'm going to make a glowing recommendation. But, this is not the case.  In fact, I believe that this book was more promising than successful.  There were definitely some admirable aspects to it, but I would strongly hesitate in recommending the book to other readers.

One reason for this concerns the book's style. On one hand, Graudin's voice utilizes effective dirty realism.  The setting of the walled city — its grime, its poverty, its depravity — sprung to life on the page. On the other hand, there was an extraordinary amount of purple prose. I felt like I was drowning in a sea of similes and and conceits.  At best, I felt some appreciation for the imagination of Graudin's writing. At worst, the prose was so clogged with stylistic elements that I was jarred out of the story completely.

Then, there was the pacing.  This is a story that could have benefited from a break-neck pace.  Instead, the plot was structured around an 18-day countdown.  A mistake, in my opinion.  I slogged through the story. My attention struggled to find a grasp.  Instead of propelling the plot forward, the narration got bogged down in reminisces and extraneous tangents.  

Another complaint — Graudin falls into the tired trope of instantaneous attraction. (AKA — insta-love)  As if I wasn't rolling my eyes enough over the melodramatic prose, all of the hot flashes and abdominal tingling of the love-struck characters sent me over the edge.  What made this nascent relationship extra questionable is that it involved a horribly abused girl who had been forced into sex work.  Giving her such a shallow plot-line really diminished the utter gravity of her situation.  I could not switch over emotionally from descriptions of horrific, sexual abuse to scenes of giddy young love.  It caused me to withdraw emotionally from the story.

It's a shame that this book had such fatal flaws.  If the style had been plainer, the plot brisker, the relationships more thoughtful, I could see myself enjoying this book for its resonant setting and high-stakes storyline.  As it is, I give The Walled City two north stars out of five.