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Book Report
Sep. 15th, 2012 05:29 amBook report time!
Ready Player One by Ernest Cline – I picked this audio book up via a recommendation from![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
nytshd3, and I am so glad I did. It’s totally not my usual genre but it’s really cool. The main plotline is this: some 40 or so years in the future, the planet sucks, most people are hungry and environmental devastation is everywhere. People spend as much time as they can in a free, virtual world called The Oasis. The creator of the Oasis has died and has left his fortune to whoever can find an extremely well-hidden easter egg inside the huge Oasis. Our protagonist, whose life outside the Oasis is pretty crappy, is determined to find the easter egg before it is found by the greedy, mega-corporation IOI. If IOI gets its hands on the egg, they will start to charge for and corrupt the Oasis, ruining the only thing that makes life bearable for millions of people. The audio book was narrated by Wil Wheaton (in case you didn’t know, he was Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: Next Gen and has become a well-known blogger and sci-fi fan himself). I loved that the hero’s love interest is not your standard beauty. I loved all the 80’s and sci fi references, and I now find myself feeling oddly affectionate towards Wil Wheaton and Wesley Crusher. I was completely hooked. Grade: A
Woman in Exile: My Life in Kazakhstan by Juliana Starosolska - This is a memoir by a Ukrainian woman who, in the 1940’s, was forced to exile by Stalin’s government along with her mother and brother. They were put in a boxcar with many other deportees and sent to a far-flung area of the USSR. The writing is good but I didn’t like the book’s structure – I really would have preferred a linear narrative instead of a series of vignettes. The non-linear vignettes just made the book somewhat choppy and took away from the experience. But still, it wasn’t bad. Grade: B
More books behind the cut!
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Ready Player One by Ernest Cline – I picked this audio book up via a recommendation from
nytshd3, and I am so glad I did. It’s totally not my usual genre but it’s really cool. The main plotline is this: some 40 or so years in the future, the planet sucks, most people are hungry and environmental devastation is everywhere. People spend as much time as they can in a free, virtual world called The Oasis. The creator of the Oasis has died and has left his fortune to whoever can find an extremely well-hidden easter egg inside the huge Oasis. Our protagonist, whose life outside the Oasis is pretty crappy, is determined to find the easter egg before it is found by the greedy, mega-corporation IOI. If IOI gets its hands on the egg, they will start to charge for and corrupt the Oasis, ruining the only thing that makes life bearable for millions of people. The audio book was narrated by Wil Wheaton (in case you didn’t know, he was Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: Next Gen and has become a well-known blogger and sci-fi fan himself). I loved that the hero’s love interest is not your standard beauty. I loved all the 80’s and sci fi references, and I now find myself feeling oddly affectionate towards Wil Wheaton and Wesley Crusher. I was completely hooked. Grade: A Woman in Exile: My Life in Kazakhstan by Juliana Starosolska - This is a memoir by a Ukrainian woman who, in the 1940’s, was forced to exile by Stalin’s government along with her mother and brother. They were put in a boxcar with many other deportees and sent to a far-flung area of the USSR. The writing is good but I didn’t like the book’s structure – I really would have preferred a linear narrative instead of a series of vignettes. The non-linear vignettes just made the book somewhat choppy and took away from the experience. But still, it wasn’t bad. Grade: B
More books behind the cut!
( Read more... )
