Ready Player One: A Novel

We listened to this audiobook on tour one year, and can vouch that this is an exciting story of futuristic nerdery and teen angst. If you're into virtual reality, old school video games, 80s pop culture, hacking, and the band Rush, you'll dig this book a lot. Even if you're not into any of this stuff, it's still an engaging and action-y story of a young gamer hacking his way out of futuristic slums, pursuing a nerdy date, and trying to save the virtual world and find a place of his own in the real one. It's a fun book. Like so much sci fi these days, it tries to be feminist and intersectional, and doesn't quite hit the nail on the head—the main character is a white guy (albeit of the lowest class), the gender and sexuality norms are pretty normy, and there's a big ole splash of tokenism at the end. Be that as it may, you can probably still read and enjoy this book heartily.