Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

Ready Player One is a debut novel by Ernest Cline, published in 2011. His second novel, Armada, came out this summer. A film version of Ready Player One is in the works, produced by Steven Spielberg. The difficulty lies in obtaining rights to the myriad of 80's pop culture references - music, movies, video games, and entire literary worlds are experience in the global virtual reality environment called the OASIS.

This book was an absolute pleasure to read. Even though I did not grow up in the 80's, the references were so well described that it did not matter. I enjoyed experiencing virtual worlds with the unlikely protagonist, Parzival/Wade3/Wade Watts, a poor kid from the mid-west.

If Willy Wonka was the creator of a global virtual reality in a dystopian future, that would be Ready Player One. Read it if you grew up in the 80's, if you love video games, dystopian fiction, virtual reality, or are a nerd of any kind.