Darth Pedant

I am a gamer girl and an eighties child. It was a pretty fun decade to spend most of my childhood in and my nostalgia for the video games and music and movies of yesteryear is pretty strong. When someone described this book to me as “eighties nostalgia porn” I was all, “I am SO THERE for that!” So color me disappointed when I didn’t love this book quite as much as I thought I would.

I think what’s keeping me from loving READY PLAYER ONE with an unrestrained 5-star passion is this persistent feeling I had throughout that Cline had actually written an eighties homage movie script and then tried to pad it to book length. It delivers on the nostalgia bigtime and some parts I found really entertaining, but . . . I just . . . sigh.

I found the infodumps clunky and unwieldy. Boring pace-killers, all of them (and there were many). Same with the romance. Wade is basically a Gary Stu. And the writer’s convenience is so heavy-handed it should share the byline. READY PLAYER ONE by Ernest Cline and Writer S. Convenience.

The only parts I really enjoyed were when Wade was actively trying to solve the puzzles (and I really, really enjoyed those parts). So maybe I’ll love the movie like I thought I’d love the book. Unless Matt Frewer’s not in it. Then there might be some table-flipping.