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What Members Thought
Oh, how I love this book! I’ve recently been revisiting all my neo favorite novels in audiobook format. Having just reunited with my personal library, I was looking forward to rereading Ready Player One but decided to try listening to it instead. I’ve only embraced nerdery in the past few years which explains why I recognized the vocal stylizing of Wil Wheaton as Fawkes from The Guild but still didn’t realize we was Wesley Crusher. Regardless, Wheaton brings to life the saga of Wade Watts and hi
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This book suffered for me due to too much hype.
Not just hype from the kind of white male geeks that you would expect to strongly identify with such a novel, but also from girls and women who seemed to like it in spite of being mostly left out of its narrative.
So I was disappointed that it read pretty much just like a white geek boy fantasy, and that its attempts at being subversive with its geek lore and it's "rise of the nerds" themes really fell short when everything referenced is actually pre ...more
Not just hype from the kind of white male geeks that you would expect to strongly identify with such a novel, but also from girls and women who seemed to like it in spite of being mostly left out of its narrative.
So I was disappointed that it read pretty much just like a white geek boy fantasy, and that its attempts at being subversive with its geek lore and it's "rise of the nerds" themes really fell short when everything referenced is actually pre ...more
This book started slow for me, but by the last third it became compulsively readable. It's a book I likely never would have picked up on my own, but Jenny B's review made me want to check it out. Part of what I liked is that it's not the type of book I would've normally picked. That said, I think a lot of the videogame references were lost on me because I'm not someone as knowledgeable about video games. I think my biggest criticism of the book is the same criticism I had about the Martian: that
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The narration by Will Wheaton was what made this work for me! Not only was it really expressive and funny, but he has the right level of geek commitment to pull off the detailed explanations of 80s pop/geek culture in the story to make them interesting.
I think I would have had a harder time with this book if I had been reading rather than listening, but as it stands, I enjoyed the adventure, and I even got some of the references (The Dark Crystal popped up, as did Monty Python). I was almost ent ...more
I think I would have had a harder time with this book if I had been reading rather than listening, but as it stands, I enjoyed the adventure, and I even got some of the references (The Dark Crystal popped up, as did Monty Python). I was almost ent ...more
80s videogame and 80s culture overload. This book is an homage to this totally awesome era, but for me it is too much. I probably got about 80% of the references (see what I did there?) and most of them made me a bit nostalgic. As a kid (albeit, a young kid) of the 80s, and a lightweight gamer I appreciated the book. I doubt you'd get anything out of it if you were neither. Niche book.
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Jan 22, 2013
Heather
added it
Mar 17, 2015
Becki
marked it as to-read
Aug 10, 2017
Ms. McGregor
marked it as to-read
