Guest Blog: Ready Player One Review

My blog is new.  New to me, new to everyone.  I enjoy reading these books and really enjoy writing the reviews and making any connection I can with other bloggers, authors, teachers, readers, and mothers.  As I continue to read more and more, I noticed my blog is having an impact on others in my life including my husband who reads my blog daily and has picked up a few of the books I have reviewed or talked about.  Recently, he read a YA book that he thought deserved a little blog time, so I thought I would do a short interview about the book and write about it for the blog.  Here we go:

So, you read a YA book and want me to talk about it on my blog.  What’s the book and what made you want to read it?  The book is Ready Player One, the first novel by Ernest Cline.  He is the screen writer of one of my favorite movies, Fanboys.  I heard about it while listening to a podcast.  He was interviewed and the book sounds like a lot of fun.

Is this book outside your reading genre?  I usually read sci-fi novels, so this is close to what I usually read.  The book is science fiction.  It takes place about 30 years in the future in a dystopian society.  Most common and popular form of information is this thing called OASIS.  It’s like a on-line game/internet/virtual reality.

So, Dystopian society books are really popular with readers in YA.  Did you enjoy reading this type of book?  Would you read more books like that? Yes, but the real draw for me wasn’t the portrayal of the bleak future.  It was a book just packed full of 1980’s pop-culture references.  The plot of the book centers on finding a series of Easter eggs left by the creator of Oasis.  This guy was a big nerd growing up in the 80’s.  Whoever solves the puzzle gets a multi-billion dollar fortune.  All the clues to the puzzle are just these references to 80’s pop-culture.  The egg-hunters all study 1980’s pop-culture to educate themselves for the ‘game’.

So …. Were you a big nerd growing up in the 80’s? Yes.

It sounds like you really enjoyed reading this book.  Who else do you think would enjoy reading it?  Middle school and high school students who have a love of video games, as well as Fanboys in their 30’s and 40’s who fondly look back on growing up in the 80’s would really like this book.  

Anything else you want to share about reading this book?  The book did make me laugh and I really didn’t want to put it down once I started reading.  I don’t think I have been this pleasantly surprised about reading something that I didn’t know a lot about going into it since I read the first Harry Potter book.  I have a couple of friends I would really like to recommend read it.

Excellent, that is what a reading community is all about, sharing your reading, great reads, thoughts during reading, etc. with others.  Thanks for talking with me.  I am going to post this on the blog.  Do you have a next book that you are going to read now?  I think we are going to read Darth Paper Strikes Back together, right? Yep.  Love reading together.  :)