Ready Player One

I wonder what it’s like to read this if you’re not, say, exactly forty-two. Being forty-two, however (just like Ernest Cline), this was perfect. It rewards all the obscure trivia I prize, makes being into X set of movies and Y set of comics cool. And, it even goes what’s Z for me: videogames, which I don’t know as well as Ready Player One does. I mean, yeah, I haunted the arcades in the eighties like the rest of the world, knew Galaga (I’m even in a recent Galaga book) and Pac-Man and Joust and the rest, but I was never really a contender. My quarters always just lasted for a few minutes, never an afternoon. The arcade wasn’t the destination, for me, it was just the place you cruised between cruising all the other places. And, these text-based videogames Ernest Cline talks about—I mean, I’d seen a computer in junior high, I think, but never actually confronted one until a guy in my dorm had one in 1990. And it just sat there on a shelf, with its cassette-tape memory. Still, the nostalgia Ready Player One summons up, it’s not nothing. Thomas Pynchon says we always have a certain fondness for the decade we were born in, right? I amend that to ‘the decade we came of age in.’ For me that was the eighties. It was every single movie and television show this novel dips into, and from—including Schoolhouse Rock. And Def Leppard’s even here, so, nothing to complain about, right? Well, almost  . . . → → →</a