GregHowley.com

A goldmine for geeks, Ready Player One is a nostalgic adventure in a dystopian future where many adults spend the majority of their time living, working, going to school, and playing in a MMO-like online world.

Ready Player One reminded me quite a bit of Little Brother, and I mean that as a high compliment. The tech-savvy kid overcoming odds is a theme common between the two books, and the only thing keeping me from really classifying Ready Player One as YA is the fact that it's so obviously targeted at readers who grew up in the eighties. The pop culture references are ubiquitous, and Ernest Cline dropped a few references that even went over my head. I'd never heard of The Space Giants, Dungeons of Daggorath, or Leopardon.

I had however, heard of Akalabeth, Thundarr the Barbarian, The Misfits of Science, G-Force, Kaboom!, and The Tomb of Horrors, and these and other references to eighties pop culture had me chuckling and geeking out constantly. The author even references Richard K Morgan and Cory Doctorow.

But in the end, were the book only eighties references, it would have fallen flat. The story pits a desperately impoverished, unusually intelligent, and hopelessly nerdy kid and his friends (whom he's only ever met online) against a massively rich telecommunications corporation willing to murder anyone who obstructs its goals. It's a great story, and I absolutely could not put it down. I read the second half of the book in a single day.