I’m not entirely sure why I picked up Ready Player One. I’m not a sci-fi geek, I’m not into fantasy, and having just finished two fiction books I was hoping to get through a biography while on our vacation this past week. But after reading just a few pages of Ready Player One, I was hooked.

I’m not going to summarize the book for you here, you can read that on Amazon or Goodreads yourself, but I did want to write something cause I just can’t believe how freaken incredible this book is.

First of all, the VR! The way the author, Ernest Cline, describes the future of virtual reality is simply amazing. Of course, it gets a little weird at times, like haptic suits that allow you to feel everything your VR avatar touches on your body, or the smell generating machine that allows you to, well, smell within the VR world.
[With the haptic suits you’re required to adjust to certain hygiene standards, and with the smell generator (spoiler alert) people have coded in foul smells in places just to play a trick on others, so right away a ‘smell mute’ function had to be coded in as well. Dough!]

To me, the depth of the VR world to which Ernest Cline takes us speaks volumes of what could actually be ahead. I don’t think people will lose themselves in such worlds for weeks at a time, as the book suggests, but reading the book there were plenty of times where I lifted my head and thought “yeah, I can see that happening”. And there were plenty of times when the VR application described had never really crossed my mind.

Secondly, all of the ’80s references! I was born in the eighties so I don’t exactly remember much of that era, but what I do know is that my father has instilled in me a deep appreciation for the ’70s and ’80s classic rock music and there was plenty of that in the book. Plus movie references to my favorites such as War Games or Back To The Future.

Lastly, the story simply reads quickly and before I knew it I beat my all-time daily record of something like 130 pages read in one sitting. Ok, so I’m not a fast reader, and I have an attention span of an infant, but 130 pages at once told me one thing; this book is good!

Going back to why I picked up this book, or how I even knew it existed. Some of you may know I’m a fairly big Casey Neistat fan, and it was him that first mentioned that book on his channel.

And then, as Casey rightfully points out, this book has been made into a Steven Spielberg movie, so I thought it would be a good idea to read the book before the movie comes out because otherwise, the trailer just looked like a giant mess of sci-fi stuff.

If you haven’t already, READ THIS BOOK!