Book Review | Book Chatter

Ready Player One
By Ernest Cline
(Crown, Hardcover, 9780307887436, August 2011, 384pp.)

The Short of It:

An entertaining romp down memory lane, but in the end its potential for “geektastic-ness” was never fully realized.

The Rest of It:

It’s the year 2044 and the real world is apparently a place where no one wishes to live. Instead, everyone chooses to live in the OASIS, a virtual world created by James Halliday. Users don their gear, sit in their Haptic chairs and then surround themselves with valuable artifacts to be used in the game. Their avatars are everything as they choose to live their lives behind these figures.

Wade Watts is one of those people. He’s a kid, living with an Aunt who really doesn’t want him there and he has no real-life friends and only a few virtual ones, but what he does have is skill. This comes in handy when Halliday leaves his entire fortune to the person who can solve the OASIS riddle that he’s left behind.

What worked for me, are the numerous references to 80’s pop-culture. I am an 80’s girl, through and through so I enjoyed many of the references, but this book tried to be too many things and in the end it was completely consumed by the game itself.

I never considered myself a gamer, but when I was in middle school, I spent a good chunk of time playing Pac -Man, Galaga, and let’s not forget Frogger. So the fact that gaming was front and center, really wasn’t the issue here, to me, it had to do with balance or specifically the lack of it.

I didn’t really like any of the characters and they all seemed a bit flat. Perhaps much of that is due to the fact that many of their true identities are not revealed until the end of the book. Instead, we are introduced to their avatars which to me, left a lot to be desired.

For this book to have worked for me, I needed more of Wade outside of his avatar, a less predictable story and a little less of the gaming re-hash that ensued every time Wade had to do battle with his opponent via an 80’s video game.

To really understand how I felt about the book, click here.

Source: Borrowed

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Never Let Me Go
By Kazuo Ishiguro
(Vintage, Paperback, 9781400078776, October 2010, 304pp.)

The Short of It:

Hauntingly sad, poetic and beautiful.

The Rest of It:

*No obvious spoilers.

The story opens with Kathy H., who has been a “carer” for over eleven years. As she tells her story, the reader is taken back in time to her years at Hailsham, a boarding school located in the English countryside where she was friends with Tommy and Ruth. There, they took classes on all sorts of subjects and were told over and over again by their guardians, that they were special.

Yes, they are special. Very special indeed. What the reader figures out pretty early on, is that these children have a special purpose. However, the children do not know exactly what that purpose is. They just know that they are special, and during their time at Hailsham, they are given information to help them understand that purpose, but not in plain words. Not in a way that they would easily understand.

The school experience is like what you’d expect. There are cliques and teachers who test the administration with their actions. Although Kathy, Tommy and Ruth are very close friends, they have their moments, too. As they grow, they begin to realize their purpose and the dawning realization of what they are, creates tension in ways they are not often prepared to deal with.

This entire story is peppered with clinical aspects. Hailsham is very hospital-like and lab tests are the norm. Since these children really don’t know of a life different from their own, they are somewhat happy yet deep down, they yearn for something more. They just don’t know what.

In one sense, Ishiguro’s delivery is cold as ice. Everyone possesses an aloofness that is slightly off-putting. But, there is a tenderness…a softness to the characters that will make your heart ache. These characters yearn for what they don’t have, yet they have resigned themselves to the lives they’ve been given. They will never really love, because to do so, would mean losing it in the end. They can never have children, or get married or live to a ripe, old age. What they have, is the pleasure of knowing that they’ve lived their life for a purpose.

This book reminded me a lot of The Unit, which has the same premise but uses adults instead of children. In a lot of ways, this book was harder to swallow because it dealt with children, yet Ishiguro handles the topic expertly and I found myself thinking about these characters many days after finishing the book. Its coldness melted away and became profoundly touching.

I haven’t seen the movie, but now I really want to. You can view the movie trailer here.

Source: Borrowed