Ready Player One

By: Ernest Cline

Narrated by: Wil Wheaton

Length: 15 hrs and 40 mins

Publisher's summary

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Now a major motion picture directed by Steven Spielberg.

“Enchanting . . . Willy Wonka meets The Matrix.”—USA Today • “As one adventure leads expertly to the next, time simply evaporates.”—Entertainment Weekly

A world at stake. A quest for the ultimate prize. Are you ready?

In the year 2045, reality is an ugly place. The only time Wade Watts really feels alive is when he’s jacked into the OASIS, a vast virtual world where most of humanity spends their days.

When the eccentric creator of the OASIS dies, he leaves behind a series of fiendish puzzles, based on his obsession with the pop culture of decades past. Whoever is first to solve them will inherit his vast fortune—and control of the OASIS itself.

Then Wade cracks the first clue. Suddenly he’s beset by rivals who’ll kill to take this prize. The race is on—and the only way to survive is to win.

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Entertainment Weekly • San Francisco Chronicle • Village Voice • Chicago Sun-Times • iO9 • The AV Club

“Delightful . . . the grown-up’s Harry Potter.”—HuffPost

“An addictive read . . . part intergalactic scavenger hunt, part romance, and all heart.”—CNN

“A most excellent ride . . . Cline stuffs his novel with a cornucopia of pop culture, as if to wink to the reader.”—Boston Globe

“Ridiculously fun and large-hearted . . . Cline is that rare writer who can translate his own dorky enthusiasms into prose that’s both hilarious and compassionate.”—NPR

“[A] fantastic page-turner . . . starts out like a simple bit of fun and winds up feeling like a rich and plausible picture of future friendships in a world not too distant from our own.”—iO9

©2011 Ernest Cline (P)2011 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

2017, Laura Hillenbrand Outstanding Literary Award, Winner

“The science-fiction writer John Scalzi has aptly referred to Ready Player One as a ‘nerdgasm’ [and] there can be no better one-word description of this ardent fantasy artifact about fantasy culture. . . . But Mr. Cline is able to incorporate his favorite toys and games into a perfectly accessible narrative.” (Janet Maslin, The New York Times)

“This non-gamer loved every page of Ready Player One.” (Charlaine Harris, #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Sookie Stackhouse series)

A book you can read over and over

This book still sits on the top of my favorite book lists after many listens. It’s a delightful nostalgic trip into 80s culture with a dystopian feel. Great characters, humor, and development. And great narration!

Thrilling, Awesome, and intensely Geeky!

You will LOVE this book.

Full of constant, thrilling action, awesome technology and world-building, and believable characters whom you end up really caring about, Ready Player One is easily one of the funnest books I've read in years!

While not particularly provocative or deep, the pure entertainment value of such an exciting, wild story so well-told is enough to make even the pickiest of readers just eat this book up!

Plus - all that 80's and Gamer geekyness give it an extra-fun, nostalgic flair that will totally make you fall in love with it if you grew up in that decade or consider yourself a gamer in any way.

Just friggen READ IT already!

Effing awesome

read this. do it now. if you put it off another minute you'll regret it forever.

Loved it

on the edge of my seat and loved all the 80's pop culture references. great story and characters

Love this book!

I really, really liked this book. You know how fun it is when you are watching a movie or a TV show or listening to a song and you see or hear a reference to your favorite movie or TV show or song? This movie is filled with non-stop references to all of my favorite movies, TV shows, and songs (video games as well, but I didn't get many of those references). The story takes place in the future where a man who has created an alternate reality similar to World of Warcraft but on a much larger and virtual scale. This man dies promising his fortune to the first person who can solve all of these riddles and find a hidden easter egg in his alternate reality. The man loved the 1980s so many references were made to movies, music, and video games from that era. I liked the characters in this book. I very much enjoyed the narration and I was hugely impressed with the amount of thought that went into the story-line as all of these allusions tied so closely to the plot. One scene made me giddy as it directly referenced one of my favorite movies of all time.

Amazing sense of ... nostalgia?

I was born in the 1980's and i think i learned more from this book than anything i experienced growing up. My NES played Super Mario Bro's exclusively and now I feel as though i missed so much! This story feels like both a cautionary technology dependence tale as well as a fun journey to childhood and decades past. This fictional world that Ernest Cline has created is so eerily similar to our own that you look around and wonder when the oasis will be announced. I think this is a must read for any tech minded person, amateur or master.

Narrator:
Wil Wheaton was amazing. His voice really felt as though it belonged among these 80's references. He helped immerse me into the world and gave each character life.

You should download this book!

Great Combination of Three Genres

This is the best audiobook I have listened to this year (and that is an embarrassingly large number of audiobooks). It fits into the science fiction category as it takes place in a distopian near future in which vast numbers of people retreat into an online multiplayer game that takes on the status of an alternate reality that is more important to many people than real life. This is also a coming of age novel focusing on a group of young people who learn about themselves and about each other while going through a harrowing online adventure. The third category is the "popular culture" genre as the heroes have to navigate an online game based on 1980s pop culture, especially popular "geek" culture. The combination is very original. This novel is a great nostalgia trip for anyone born between about 1950 and 1975 and is just a great adventure for anyone younger than that. And the performance is excellent.

Simply excellent

First off Wil Wheaton nailed the reading, go figure. Secondly but still equally important the story was just awesome, the descriptions we're vivid, I thought I was in the Oasis! Do you like video games? Do you like the 80s? Do you like good stories? If you answered yes, yes and Duh! get this book...if you didn't get it anyways!

We love the 80's :-)

What made the experience of listening to Ready Player One the most enjoyable?

This book was a great 80's throw back, with lots of retro 80's humor. While this book isn't for everyone, anyone who was a greek in the 1980's will enjoy the humor, adventure and writing style of this book.

Trip down memory lane...

As a product of the 80's the book was right up my alley. Reading through this book brought back a lot of great memories about the pre-internet world of movies, music videos and video games! If you are part of that generation, this book will bring back warm memories, for those of you who had the mis-fortune of missing that decade, read this book and try to imagine how awesome it was!