LISNews: Librarian News

Ready Player One

Book review on NPR: http://www.npr.org/2011/08/22/139760489/player-one-a-winning-geeked-out-page-turner

Excerpt from review:
If you grew up in the 1980s and resided anywhere on the nerd-geek spectrum, all it takes is the right Rush or Genesis song to bring you back to the video arcade. This was before video games became visually stunning and able to be controlled just by waving your hand in the air. Back then, gaming consoles were behemoths with perpetually sticky buttons, and the game-play usually involved some variation on moving a dot around while shooting dots at differently colored dots.

It might not sound like much, but if you're the right age, the feeling of nostalgia can be almost overwhelming. Those arcade games, and those fond memories, are the subject of Ernest Cline's unapologetically nerdy debut novel, Ready Player One. The narrative takes place 30 years into the future, but — to quote Lou Reed's song "Down at the Arcade" — "its heart's in 1984."