It is fashionable to dunk on this now, some of it fair. Definitely brought me back to when my parent used to go to the bowling alley and I would escape with a roll of quarters to the arcade.

In order to gain the copper key, he must beat the boss in a game of Joust, which is an 80's video game that has the player jousting as a knight on an ostrich. Wade does it alone, having played it ten thousand times because nobody else was around. He spends most of his time in his hideout, an old abandoned van he has modified to provide the basic necessities: solitude and an internet connection. It hit me as recognition rather than nostalgia. Ready Player One is pretty much about loneliness, identity, and what counts as real and what doesn't. It isn't a playground for these kids. It's a bunker.

I've heard the big complaint. Reading this book was like watching someone else play a video game. As a gamer I can't argue, that's the ache. One of my favorites I cried tears at the end when it explained Halliday loved Kira but was too antisocial strange to tell her and that his best friend married her.

Goofy bits aside. Wade even loses weight and gets a flat stomach by using a feature of the game that only lets you play if you are eating well and exercising, which readers smirked at as a tidy cheat, thin and worthy of love now. And Daito. For example, when Daito was killed, I didn't feel nearly as bad as I probably should have had the secondary characters had more of their own, fleshed-out personality. When talking about suicide, the Japanese kid uses the word "seppuku" (which is ritual suicide) to describe suicide, but no one in Japan would use that word for that. For a book about found family that's a miss, Og should've busted in sooner.

Do I think it's a masterpiece?? No. But the last line landed. "It occurred to me then that for the first time in as long as I could remember, I had absolutely no desire to log back into the OASIS." It knows exactly which lonely kid it's for, and I was that kid.