Ready Player One And The 80s I Didn't Actually Live Through

I was born after most of the 80s references in this book actually happened, so I read it the way I imagine someone reads a book stuffed with 90s references I actually got, half nostalgic secondhand and half just along for the ride. Wade Watts hunts an easter egg hidden inside a massive virtual world by a dead game designer obsessed with his own childhood, and for a while that premise carries a lot of momentum on its own.

The problem, and other people have put this better than me, is the rhythm of the prose settles into something like interesting, interesting, interesting, then a wall of trivia, over and over. It’s not that the references are wrong, it’s that they stop being characterization and start being homework the plot needs you to pass. One review called out the characters as basically genius-IQ trivia machines and that lands, nobody in this book struggles the way a real teenager with those stakes would struggle.

Where it worked for me was the loneliness underneath all the arcade noise, Wade in a stack of trailers, plugged into a better world because the real one gave him nothing. That part is honest in a way the treasure hunt mechanics aren’t. I did the audiobook, Wil Wheaton narrating, and it’s genuinely a better experience read aloud than on the page, his delivery smooths over some of the info-dump pacing that trips up the print version.

Three stars. Fun enough that I finished it in two days, thin enough that I probably won’t reread it the way I already know I’ll reread other things on this list.