Ready Player One

By Ernest Cline

Broadway Books     2011

374 pages     Science Fiction

Audio Book

What a marvelous geek fest! My husband and I listened to Ready Player One on our trip to the Alabama coast in February. It got us there and back, and then we had to spend a few breakfast reading days to finish it. What amazed me was that it held the attention of 70-somethings who didn’t quite get all the 80s references the book offered—and my husband has never played a video game in his life. Still, we were fascinated and can’t wait for the movie to come out at the end of the month.

The reality of teenage Wade Watts is dystopian. It is 2044 in Oklahoma, and the world is in near collapse. Wade lives in a high rise of stacked house trailers, but his true life is the virtual reality universe he escapes to every day. He attends school in that universe and spends most of his time in a game called the OASIS, a virtual-reality online game. One reviewer called it Second Life on steroids.

The OASIS was designed by a famous video game designer from the 1980s named James Halliday, who has hidden his fortune (billions of dollars) in the online game. The entire geek world is trying to find the Easter Egg, the last treasure in the game that will release the money, but it has been five years since Halliday died, and no one has made much progress. Wade’s gaming Avatar, Parzival, is racking up points in the game, but it is when he combines forces with four other avatars that the excitement begins to build. Of course there has to be an enemy, and the OASIS enemy is a corporate behemoth named IOI that is attempting to take over the world.

That’s the plot. But it is so much fun. Ready Player One is very visual, because Cline is a screenwriter, but it is also extremely humorous. The references just keep rolling. In order to solve the game, Wade has had to become familiar with as many 1980s references as he can, so lines from movies, TV shows, and songs are abundant. For example, somebody found 88 movie references in the book. (How many times would you have to read a book to document all the references? I told you it was a geek fest!) Wade also has to master every video game from the 1980s and decide which of those games were Halliday’s favorites.

We especially enjoyed the audio reading by actor, Will Wheaton. (I saw him last night on an episode of Big Bang Theory.) He brings the book to life. BTW, he mentioned in an interview that he really likes doing audio books because that’s how he gets his own reading done by preparing for the audio recording. The movie is directed by Steven Spielberg, the biggest name around. Early reviews are encouraging. The movie makers must have had a great time!

My last comment is that reading doesn’t have to be a serious enterprise. Sometimes it just needs to be fun, fun, fun. This is one of those times!

Here is a you tube video of references in the movie.

The Great Gatsby

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Scribners   Reissue 2013

192 pages      Fiction

Audio read by Jake Gyllenhaal

The Great Gatsby again for the first time--this time as an audio book. It was a remarkable experience with a distance of about 50 years between first reading and second reading. A whole lifetime of experience.

I read somewhere that educators like to have students read The Great Gatsby in the 11th grade (which is probably when I read it the first time). I spent much of my listening to it this time trying to understand how young unformed minds would understand the book. Perhaps it is because Nick Carraway is such a good observer, or that Gatsby yearns so for Daisy that he bases his whole life on winning her back. Perhaps it is that students will recognize the stereotypes of Daisy and Jordan, and Tom. More likely it is the idea of the wild parties every weekend that appeals to students. 

Here are some things that I noticed this time around. I particularly liked Nick this time around. He is such an observer, but he is no pushover. He has a hugely skeptical nature, and seems not to be swayed by the money, the power, nor the panache of the people in his company. He says of himself, "Everyone suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known." And truly he is honest...particularly with himself. He is fascinated by the people around him, but he is so clear-eyed and wise.

I was also struck by the audacity of Gatsby's dreams. He seemed willing to do or be anything in order to find his goal--to make enough money in order to win back the love of Daisy. Nothing else seems to matter to  him. R. Clifton Spargo, writing in the Huffington Post, says:  "There may be something pathetic in Gatsby's class striving, but there's something innocent about it, too. He's a stranger in the world he inhabits, floating through his own parties without enjoying them, bestowing his largess on mostly uninvited guests who are really just users." When Nick calls to him, "They're a rotten crowd....You're worth the whole damn bunch put together," I was confused at first. Conventional wisdom would have him be a "rotten" person as well, because of the way he made his money. Now I realize that there is a purity in his motivation that supersedes all pretension. When Daisy says of him, "Oh, you want too much!" we can truly empathize with her despair. Such devotion is debilitating--to both him and her. 

The awesomely tragic nature of Gatsby's death came forcefully to me when Nick tries, unsuccessfully, to find someone--anyone--to come to his funeral. It was absolutely heartbreaking. In the book I just finished, Domestic Affairs, the governor running for President declines to attend the funeral of a friend and campaign assistant because he is "too busy." For Tom, Daisy, and Jordan to not attend Gatsby's funeral is just as disgusting. Nick says that they are "careless people," and with this reading, I truly understood what that meant. I also truly understood why Nick remains the only honest person he knows. Everyone else survives on their own delusions.

And so, I would recommend to all my readers that they either read or listen to The Great Gatsby before you watch the newest movie version. It is truly an overwhelming experience. My husband kept saying, "Listen to those words. I can't believe how well Fitzgerald writes."

Be sure, also to read Spargo's recommendation about people reading the book again in maturity. It truly is reading it again--for the first time.

Divine Justice

By David Baldacci

New York, Grand Central, 2008

387 pages     Fiction

There is nothing like listening to a book to make the miles fly by! We began listening to David Baldacci’s Divine Justice as we drove to and from Michigan to Minnesota a week ago. When we got home, we still had two disks to hear. But we were home. What to do? Well, I went to the library and got the book, and we read it aloud to each other at the breakfast table until we finished it this morning. Ah…satisfaction.

Frankly, I had never read any David Baldacci and didn’t know anything about the Camel Club who are the supporting cast in the continuing series about John Carr, alias Oliver Stone, a paid assassin for the United States government. It is not necessary to have read the other books in the series because you get caught up pretty quickly, although I had some questions about why Oliver Stone was on the run that didn’t get answered until the very end of the book. Must have happened in a previous book. 

The setting is interesting—a small town in Appalachia. The town of Divine, where Oliver Stone unintentionally ends up has some immediate weirdness to it. It is too prosperous looking for the drugged out coal miners who inhabit the place. The fact that there is a maximum security prison on the outskirts of the town makes it even more foreboding. One reader thought the setting was rather strange for an Oliver Stone novel. I had no basis for comparison, except to note that very few spy-type novels happen in Appalachia. But I guess if you were a spy-assassin on the run, Appalachia might be a good place to hide. 

There is a lot to like about formulaic books; mostly the comfort factor. And Baldacci has the formula down pat. I particularly listened for the ends of chapters. He knows exactly how to end a chapter—the reader is left with enough questions that you turn the page quickly. You know, as well, in a formulaic book, it will all end well, despite the required number of deaths.

The characters are interesting and very visual. I knew what they all looked liked. It helped that the audio book reader was very effective in creating the characters (not so much when my husband was doing the reading after we got the hard copy to finish the story). The villains are really villainous; Oliver Stone is appealing as is John Knox, the agent who is out to get him. They, of course, have a great deal of humanity to them. Just like in most formulaic action books, the characters are never fully developed beyond the basics; you will never become terribly attached to the character because that isn’t what the book is about. It is all about the plot.

So, then, why read David Baldacci. He is a master at this kind of fiction. You know that you won’t be disappointed. I like to read authors like Baldacci because I am so intrigued about how an author can figure out a way to create books that people will keep buying. One reviewer called Divine Justice “a thumping good read.” And I believe that is high praise. One other reviewer says about Baldacci, “(Baldacci) helps set the standard for thriller readers with his fast pacing, intricate plots, twists and double crosses.” 

David Baldacci has published 24 novels. The books in the Camel Club series include, The Camel Club, The Collectors, Stone Cold, Divine Justice, and Hell’s Corner. 

David Baldacci’s website: http://davidbaldacci.com

The Road

By Cormac McCarthy

New York, Knopf, 2006

256 pages   Fiction

AudioBooks 2006 read by Tom Stechschulte   6.75 hours

The road for us was the interstate driving home from our spring vacation. We slipped the disks of The Road by Cormac McCarthy into the player and took off. Cocooned as we were in our car, we became so totally engrossed in the journey of the man and the boy on the post apocalyptic road that we were totally disoriented when we stopped to get gas. “Where are we?” my husband asked? There were well-fed, well-dressed people all around us; we felt like refugees.

  

Cormac McCarthy won the Pulitzer Prize for literature for The Road, a bleak dystopian novel about a father and son who are on their way to someplace warmer following some type of disaster—the type never disclosed. They have been traveling for years, since the boy was very little and now he is about 10. Their bond is so definitive that the boy very seldom questions a decision the father makes, unless it involves being unkind or hurting the few people they meet, or when they have to scavenge through an abandoned house. The boy is so pure that his father calls him “the one” and tells him that they are the “good guys” and they are bringing “the fire.” We never know the names of the two—they are only “the man” and “the boy” until the very end of the book when the man becomes known as “the father.”

The story is deceptively simple in its telling. The father and the son speak to each other in short sentences—the dialogue is very spare. The father frequently hugs his son when the boy tells him, “I’m so scared!” He comforts him by saying, “It’s OK” over and over again.

The love between father and son is religious in nature; the father is consumed with getting his son to a safe place so that the boy will restore the world to its former goodness, so that his purity will bring salvation to the world. When the father dies, the boy is found by another pilgrim family “some good guys” who are also carrying the fire. The father dies knowing his son is “the one” because the boy tells him so. When they capture a man who stole from them, the father leaves the robber naked on the road to freeze. The boy protests but the father chides him: “You’re not the one who has to worry about everything.” And then the 10-year-old messiah, who is compassion incarnate, and carrying the fire, gives up his secret. He says to his father: “Yes I am. I am the one.”

One would think that such a austere novel would be difficult to read (or in our case) listen to, but it is so magnificently written that the reader hangs on every perfectly placed word. One reviewer said that it was so beautifully written that readers would seldom ever find another so magnificent in its prose. 

Dennis LeHane has said of The Road: “McCarthy has always written about the battle between light and darkness; the darkness usually comprises 99.9% of the world, while any illumination is the weak shaft thrown by a penlight running low on batteries. In The Road, those batteries are almost out—the entire world is, quite literally, dying—so the final affirmation of hope in the novel's closing pages is all the more shocking and maybe all the more enduring as the boy takes all of his father's (and McCarthy's) rage at the hopeless folly of man and lays it down, lifting up, in its place, the oddest of all things: faith.”

This is the first novel by Cormac McCarthy I have read, although I had seen the movie version of No Country for Old Men. I tried to watch The Road when it first came out on DVD, but it was too bleak. The audio book was beautifully read and in our confinement in the car, we were able to hear each carefully chosen word. I envisioned McCarthy honing each sentence, over and over again until it was just perfect.

As we reached the middle of the sixth CD and I knew that the father was going to die, I thought to myself, “I can’t bear it! I’m not going to be able to bear it.” The pathos is so stark; I couldn’t stop crying, even though I saw it coming. When the CD ended, I turned off the dial, and my husband and I sat in stunned silence for a long time. Finally, he turned on the radio to NPR and we listened to David Sedaris tell a long silly story about dogs. It was only a novel after all. 

Cormac McCarthy’s website: http://www.cormacmccarthy.com/

Here is the beautifully written New York Times review of The Road: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/08/books/review/Kennedy.t.html?pagewanted=all