Ready Player One Review

A while back I stumbled across a Youtube account called 'ItsWayPastMyBedtime' run by Carrie Hope Fletcher. It was blatant from the get go that she has a passion for books and reading stories, and she suggests some fantastic reads. 

I watched a video named 'Carrie's Book Haul' where she recommended a book called 'Ready Player One' by Ernest Cline amongst others like The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I decided, at the next given opportunity to purchase this book as it sounded like something that I needed to read immediately. 

The three progressions of the books front cover.

Short Synopsis

I'm not going to spoil too much of this book for you, as I think it definitely is one of my favourite reads of all time, pushing me to recommend it to you. 

The world, exactly 30 years from now, is falling to pieces and everyone is escaping the harsh truths of reality by congregating in a huge online gaming platform known as the OASIS where they can go to school, hang out with friends, or ever since the creator of the platform's demise, they can hunt around for clues to a hidden Easter egg. If they can be the first of millions to find this Easter egg (after progressing through three well hidden gates and completing some tough challenges) they will win the fortune of James Halliday, the creator of OASIS.

Wade Watts is a likeable protagonist. He has everything going for him, apart from his wrecked home life, being severely bullied as a child, and inability to get a girl without meeting her through a computer first. I suppose this novel was the best thing that could have ever happened to him. 

The novel is packed full with game, and sci-fi film references, 80's trivia and long, funny sounding names of distant OASIS planets. A certainly resilient and certainly nerdy Wade Watts is determined to uncover the Easter egg, much aided by his need to get away from his particularly uninviting reality. But when friendship, two Japanese players, a girl he has a crush on and an army of millions known as the 'Sixers' are out to kill him and everyone else close to the winnings, will he make it?

My Thoughts

If I'm honest, once I started reading this novel, I could only make it about three chapters through before calling it a failed attempt and putting it down. To say the start of the book was slow would be an under-exaggeration...try worse than a tortoise trying to read 'To Kill a Mockingbird'. It wasn't until a six-hour stuffy car journey down to the coast that I decided to give the novel another chance. And aren't I glad I did. 

Much to my annoyance, after about a third of the book, you can't put it down. You can't sleep without 'just reading one more chapter', and put all eating, drinking, work and toilet breaks to a side just so you can procrastinate your day away whilst fully indulged in a great read. I wouldn't go as far to say this is literary magic, but a completely gripping and thrilling novel all the same.

This read is an absolute must for 80's kids, dystopian lovers, sci-fi nerds, and anyone with the ability to understand and appreciate a good book when they see one. Just remember who to blame when you are physically frightened for all of the characters, and have severe arm cramps from holding the novel for too long. 

Aftermath

Ten months after the novel's publishing, Cline revealed that there was an elaborately hidden Easter egg in the book itself, and would lead fans through a similar style hunt to find it. The grand prize was a DeLorean (and for those of you like myself who don't have any clue what this is, it is a pretty cool car)

There have also been talks of a film adaptation of the book. 

Fingers Crossed.

Question Time

Have you ever given up on a slow-starting book and then revisited it, realising it is amazing?!

The Fault In Our Stars Review

CAUTION - SPOILERS.

You have to submit to the sheer emotional trauma experienced in this teen movie sensation, based on the colossal novel by John Green. The film portrays an 'epic love story' as told through the eyes of a certainly resilient Hazel Grace Lancaster (played by Shailene Woodley), and manages to take you through a whirlwind of emotions in the 126 minute running time. 

Hazel Grace Lancaster is a particularly intelligent and sarcastic teenage cancer patient whose thyroid lesions have metastasised to her lungs; her condition, once critical has soon stabilised with an experimental drug treatment, but leaves her wheeling around her portable oxygen tank, and forever having to sit down. After wanting to just be a normal teenager, she is forced, much to her dismay to go to a nearby cancer support group. It is here where she bumps into the other main protagonist of the story, Augustus Waters (portrayed by Ansel Elgort) as they joke about his prosthetic leg, oblivion and his infamous hamartia of putting a cigarette between his teeth and not allowing it to 'do the killing'. From the get go it looked as if they were destined to be together.

A debatably rash Augustus invites Hazel back to his house, where they both decide to read 

each others favourite novels: Hazel's being 'An Imperial Affliction' which soon, after more bonding, flirting and mind-blowingly effective quotes about oblivion, stars and love, would see them travel to Amsterdam together (much to Hazel's doctors' dismay) to meet the infamous author, Peter Van Houten.

A plane journey, and romantic dinner-date later and they show up at Van Houten's abode to find him drunk, uncooperative and down-right rude. He insults Hazel's cancer, and refuses to answer any questions about the book, the main reason for the duo's travel to Amsterdam. In an attempt to apologise for what a cantankerous sod Van Houten had been, his assistant Lidewjj treats them to a trip to the Anne Frank House, where Augustus and Hazel share their first kiss, after struggling up many flights of stairs. 

'After that I fell in love with him like you fall asleep, slowly and then all at once' Hazel Grace explains as Augustus and her become smitten in one another's company. The day after, as if to dampen the mood Augustus reveals his cancer has relapsed, and once back in America, his health dramatically worsens, forcing him to the wheelchair. He asks Hazel Grace and Isaac to read him their eulogies, and Hazel quotes Van Houten on 'big and small infinities'. After all three had shared tears, amongst every single person in the audience that night, all of a sudden Augustus was dead, and Hazel was left at the funeral with only a sheet of paper written by Augustus and delivered by Van Houten, stating his eulogy of her to show for their most definitely 'epic love story'.

I have to applaud how the movie managed to make you connect so much with the characters in such a short space of time that you both cry and laugh with them. The casting was perfect in my mind, as Ansel, and Shailene have such great chemistry on the screen, and the movie did a pretty good job at sticking to the books principles. I also have to applaud Shailene Woodley's ability to pull of that short hair!

I hate to be a downer, and however much I myself like this tragic story, but I feel as if the whole movie was leading up to something big, and then Augustus's death fell a little short, and happened all so quickly. If you had blinked in the cinema, you probably would have missed it. 

And is the whole franchise really worth all of the hype? I mean, it is a blooming good read, and very gripping to watch, but there are other books out there with slightly more to offer. Saying that, I think The Fault in Our Stars has a very unique ability to mix cancer, a love story, a death and no happy ending, and manage to pull it off. We connect with Augustus and Hazel, and really learn that we can dictate our lives. Oblivion is inevitable, but a sad ending isn't.

The title of the book is taken from Cassius in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar: "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars/ But in ourselves, that we are underlings." Hazel and Augustus realise that cancer was always in the stars for them, though it was them to choose how to deal with it. And I think that is the best summary, or closing thought I could end on. Life is an object for you to mould, and that is exactly what our protagonists did.