Ernest Cline, _Ready Player One_

ANOTHER CONVALESCENCE READ. What with Mark Haddon and this one, I guess I'm catching up on my YAF.

Or is this YAF? The Huffington Post, according to the blurb on the back, called Ready Player One "the grown-up's Harry Potter." Mmm...I think not. It is not much like the Harry Potter books, because the "world" the story takes place in is a lot thinner than Rowling's and the relationships among the characters generally static, and I would not say it it really for grown-ups, either.

Our protagonist and narrator is Wade Watts, 17 or 18, who is trying (via his avatar, Parzifal) to win an elaborate contest/game occurring in a vast virtual cosmos called OASIS. The prize: ownership of OASIS. His main competition: IOI, a corporate behemoth with bottomless resources and zero scruples.

It's a bit David and Goliath, a bit Real People vs. the Suits, quite a bit plain old adventure-quest with riddles to solve, tasks to complete, opposition to overcome, and so on. Wade-Parsifal does make friends and fall in love along the way, but the people he becomes friends with/falls in love with are interested in precisely what he is interested in, so not much develops there.

The third section ("Level 3") did appeal to me, though, for a couple of reasons. For one, Wade executes a clever ruse to get inside IOI for intelligence/sabotage purposes, and his sojourn in the beast makes for some good Orwellian satire of the workplace-as-Panopticon. For another, he and his friends discover that the key to winning the game is that they co-operate. They had occasionally lent each other a hand or a tip in Levels One and Two, but insisted on being lone wolves; turns out, though, that the "Crystal Key" only functions if three players collaborate. A nice touch, I thought.