Ready Player One by Ernest Cline (2011)

2015.10.20
I got this from the library weeks ago, but its taking forever to make progress. In a few weeks I've only read a few chapters. I wonder if I should be embarrassed, as I used to inhale books. Maybe I'm just out of the habit, or too distracted by endless chores, and I feel like I can't just take an hour and sit somewhere. And yet I allow myself to fall into the timesink that is the Internet all the time.
I used to watch TV while eating. Even if, especially if, it was only 15 minutes, I felt like no harm done. But at the end of the day that time adds up to a very low yield. Maybe better to save that looking time for the end of the day, when the brain has started its shutdown process. Prime time can and should be reading time.

2015.10.31
Spoilers, always.
Finished last night, going from halfway to complete, staying up way too late. After a long slow start, things finally started happening, ever faster, like the payoff after the long slow climb of a roller coaster.
I don't know if I liked it or not, but pleasure is only one part of why one reads. The story of the contest is not that interesting, because you know it can only really end one way, just like you know the hero is getting the girl at the end. The thing I need to retain from this story is its take on other space.
It takes some writing bravery to create the matrix of all matrixes, the cyberspace containing all cyberspaces. There is a lot of appeal in this metaspace containing every single intellectual property in its metaphor of planets and stars in a galaxy. I'm still thinking about it, but I don't think it quite works, and I don't think it was meant to.
I thought the endless cultural reference to the 80s (really mostly mainstream and geek 80s) might come to mean something, but it could have just as easily been another decade, and changed nothing. At first it seems like it has to be that era, because that was a big time of growth for computers, but even now in the 2010s if someone invents the next new cyberspace, it would take off just as big even if they grew up in the 90s, and we would be stuck with their cultural references instead.
I can't help but compare the feel of the book to the last one I read, The Martian, where the story is a mostly foregone conclusion, and then suddenly the big point is inserted into the last few pages, and while its not a bad sentiment, it still feels like an afterthought. The Martian said it is human nature to go to great lengths to rescue someone in trouble, and that says a lot about the basic goodness of humanity. Ready Player One says you really should go outside more.
For most of the book the real world is nasty, dirty, poor, sometimes lethal, and lonely. In the other world you can be your true self, your better self, and interact with everyone and everything. In the last minutes of the story, our hero is counseled to go outside, and when he finally gets a kiss, decides to try it. I guess this point is more profound when your computer has full body haptics and smell-o-vision, than in our current monitor age. By the end off RPO, there's not much outside left to go back to.

2015.11.09
When I finish a book (or long game) I don't usually have a conclusion and review at the ready. When I finished Mass Effect 3, I was too busy feeling betrayed for several weeks before I could even completely articulate why. For the first few days after reading RPO, I really wanted to just pick up and start from the beginning again. I thought I had a long time to think about some kind of conclusion or review, but within a week I was scarcely thinking about it anymore. Ready Player One deserves better than that.

The Martian by Andy Weir (2011)

So many favorable recommendations from so many directions, I had to read this before the movie came out and made spoilers too difficult to avoid. It was good. More should be said, but doesn't need to be. So let me get started.

Its like when you finish Harry Potter and are surprised that this is a mega-hit, because it is so simple it feels like you could have written it. And then, over time, you begin to realize just how difficult it must be to make such a good story, let alone one that gets this much praise.

The writing starts out raw, like the author himself can't believe he's really writing this, buts gains confidence right through to the end. I like that it ends with a conclusion, especially one so life affirming, so non-cynical.

The pop culture references felt like a module that just happened to be plugged in, it could just as easily have been any other module.

Much like Harry Potter, if not more so, almost anyone could read this book and gain something from it. Instant classic is something obvious to add to the marketing copy, and only time gets the final say on that, but sometimes, you just know at the time when something is a classic.

2015.10.10
Saw the movie this weekend past, and it was unsatisfying. They got 80-90% of the letter and the spirit of it up on the screen, but what they missed was crucial to getting what makes the book special. There was way too much Hollywood in here, that sort of frenetic lack of subtlety that proves how much Hollywood culture has no confidence in itself.
My least favorite thing is putting the conclusion of the story, that humanity will go to great trouble to rescue one of its own even when it makes no sense, right at the beginning of the movie. The whole book builds towards this point, and when its finally made you have been taking the journey with it. To put it at the beginning undercuts the message.
Its even more insulting that they needed to Hollywood-ize the ending, and have a dramatic action sequence at the end. And even more insulting to add a coda showing life back on Earth. But these are the sort of things you expect when Hollywood gets its ugly ham hands on a property. I didn't expect them to just unceremoniously push the point of the story out the airlock right from the start.