[review] You by Austin Grossman (2013)

Tags

book, book review, nineties, video games

You (2013)
by Austin Grossman
Electronic Book
Publication Date: April 16th, 2013
Publisher: Mulholland Books
Buy a copy via Amazon.
Synopsis from Goodreads.

When Russell joins Black Arts games, brainchild of two visionary designers who were once his closest friends, he reunites with an eccentric crew of nerds hacking the frontiers of both technology and entertainment. In part, he’s finally given up chasing the conventional path that has always seemed just out of reach. But mostly, he needs to know what happened to Simon, the strangest and most gifted friend he ever lost, who died under mysterious circumstances soon after Black Arts’ breakout hit.

My Thoughts:
After five pages, I already had a bad feeling about You (this title makes anything taken out of context sound rude or ungrammatical.) But because I thought it was impossible to make video games boring and unfinished books haunt me, so I decided to keep reading, hoping for some miracle to make this novel bearable. That didn’t happen.

You was SO BORING (thanks to the title, I now sound like a toddler). Not even in a rage inducing way so that I can at least laugh about it, but in an incredibly uneventful and bland way. The writing was long-winded, as if the author was trying to reach a word count. Pacing was gut-wrenchingly slow and fast in all the wrong places. The switches between first, second, and third person was confusing. The unannounced flashbacks and spontaneous jumps between Russell’s imagination, the video game, and reality didn’t help things. It was even worse than taking a philosophy class–there was no point in time while reading this novel that I knew what was going on. There was also no moment that I felt engaged. Everything felt disjointed and lacked direction. The characters were paper cut-outs. Worse of all, the protagonist is a condescending loser I wanted to throw off a cliff.

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[review] Ready Player One by Ernest Cline (2011)

Tags

adventure, book, book review, contest, cyberspace, dystopia, dystopian, eighties, geek, monty python, movies, nerd, pac-man, pop culture, romance, video games, virtual reality

Ready Player One (2011)
by Ernest Cline
Hardcover Edition
Publication Date: August 16th, 2011
Publisher: Random House; Crown
buy a copy via Amazon.
synopsis via Goodreads.

It’s the year 2044, and the real world is an ugly place.

Like most of humanity, Wade Watts escapes his grim surroundings by spending his waking hours jacked into the OASIS, a sprawling virtual utopia that lets you be anything you want to be, a place where you can live and play and fall in love on any of ten thousand planets. And like most of humanity, Wade dreams of being the one to discover the ultimate lottery ticket that lies concealed within this virtual world. For somewhere inside this giant networked playground, OASIS creator James Halliday has hidden a series of fiendish puzzles that will yield massive fortune—and remarkable power—to whoever can unlock them. For years, millions have struggled fruitlessly to attain this prize, knowing only that Halliday’s riddles are based in the pop culture he loved—that of the late twentieth century.

And then Wade stumbles upon the first puzzle.

Suddenly the whole world is watching, and thousands of competitors join the hunt—among them certain powerful players who are willing to commit very real murder to beat Wade to this prize.

A world at stake. A quest for the ultimate prize. Are you ready?

My Thoughts:
I completely fell in love with Ready Player One. At first, I was skeptical about the deluge of eighties/video game culture, but then I gradually didn’t even care if I had no idea what the book was referencing and just wanted to go along for the ride. I always like my books to carry a deeper meaning, something to be pondered after the last page is turned-and I was delighted to find it here; Ready Player One isn’t simply an adventurous brown bags to riches story, but more importantly, it’s about how advancing technology may not be all that glitters and virtual reality has a cost. Ready Player One is just so fun and utterly addicting-like a video game. Every time I put it down, it would nudge at me in the corner of mind, time just slipped away while I was immersed in the novel. Now I see why this was amongst the top Sci-fi books of 2011; it’s definitely my favorite read of the year so far.