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 for years, millions have found in this quest another means of escape, retreating into happy, obsessive study of Halliday’s icons. Like many of his contemporaries, Wade is as comfortable debating the finer points of John Hughes’s oeuvre, playing Pac-Man, or reciting Devo lyrics as he is scrounging power to run his OASIS rig.
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. Now the only way for Wade to survive and preserve everything he knows is towin. But to do so, he may have to leave behind his oh-so-perfect virtual existence and face up to life—and love—in the real world he’s always been so desperate to escape.

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

Okay, so my first thought when I started reading Ready Player One was, “Oh, this is gonna be another one of the dystopian/post-apocalyptic novels where the hero makes someone’s life a lot better.” I hadn’t heard of it before. But I figured I’d read it, since my boyfriend’s mom gave it to me for Christmas. Well, I was partially right. It’s a dystopian future of America, and the hero does make people’s lives a lot better.
However, Wade Owen Watts is not your typical hero. He is an overweight, underloved trailer park 18-year-old whose only friends and enemies (other than his aunt) are in the Oasis, and most of them only know him by his username, Parzival.
Basically this book appealed to the nerd in me – which is basically all of me, really. It made references to Star Wars, Star Trek ( THEY SPOKE KLINGON. THE ONLY PERSON I KNOW WHO CAN SPEAK KLINGON IS MY FATHER), Indiana Jones, Lord of the Rings, Doctor Who, D&D and awesome 80’s music. The references throughout were heavenly. The only other place that I might find as many good references at once would be MAYBE a John Green fanboard. MAYBE.
Anyway, the book flowed really well, and was very enjoyable from start to finish. Ready Player One had some freaking AMAZING worldbuilding, not just for Earth, but for the other planets that Wade and company visited as well.
My only complaint was that sometimes the nerd references were a little too much, if you know what I mean. It felt like the characters were sometimes trying to prove to each other that they knew their stuff, even when it really wasn’t necessary. Otherwise, I loved the book, and would definitely recommend it to people that love 80’s pop culture references. It was incredibly enjoyable.