Pre-pub Book Buzz: Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

I'm back! Took a couple of days off to take care of some things -- Mike was out of town last week, so Friday was a cooking and cleaning day and yesterday we helped some friends move. Today's my relax at home and read day!

August 16 will see the debut release from Ernie Cline, the screenwriter behind Fanboys. Here's a little about the book:

READY PLAYER ONE opens in the year 2044. Like most of humanity, Wade Watts escapes a grim, poverty-stricken reality by spending his waking hours jacked into a sprawling online utopia known as the OASIS, where you can be anything you want to be, and where you can live and play and fall in love on any of ten thousand planets. And like most of humanity, he is obsessed by the ultimate lottery ticket: somewhere within this alternate reality lies hidden a series of fiendish puzzles that will yield massive fortune-and remarkable power-to whoever can unlock them. But soon the search for the ticket becomes a race against time to win to try to find the ticket before he is terminated…

READY PLAYER ONE is an ode to the 80s, a love song to pop-culture esoterica such as Cap-n Crunch commercials, John Hughes movies, classic video arcades, and giant Japanese robots. Yet READY PLAYER ONE is more than the sum of its far-out references. Its exuberant virtual quest is set against life-and-death real world stakes-and at the book's heart lies a coming-of-age story about confronting reality. And it is an unlikely love story between two geeks who are afraid that the love they have online might not last in real life…

There's a longer synopsis and excerpts at the official website: www.readyplayerone.com as well as lots of 80's nostalgia bits from Cline.

Seeing as how I'm an 80's child myself, this is one that I've been looking forward to! I feel like I need to put together an 80's playlist as a soundtrack for reading the book. And just a few pages into it, I'm already getting the urge to play some Mario Bros (which, by the way, has not actually been mentioned in the book as of yet, but with the Atari nod, I was brought back to my own first gaming experiences with my neighbor's Donkey Kong arcade game and then my own Nintendo).