Book Report: Ready Player One by Ernest Cline.

John Douglas suggested that being an 80s gamer dork I might enjoy reading Ready Player One.   A few pages into the book as a man named James Halliday is describing his discovery of the first easter egg in a video game called Adventure made for the Atari 2600,  I knew John was right.  This book was written for me.  Or not just me, I suppose, but for people like me.  Reading Halliday's experience transported me back to when my family got an Atari 2600 back in, I don't know, 1980?  or so?  Adventure was one of the first games we bought.  It was my favorite.  I remember having vivid dreams (graphics way better than the game's) in which I was the main character, travelling from castle to castle fighting dragons.  I remember finding the easter egg Halliday spoke about.  There was no game magazine, no website spoilers ... just me finding a dot on the ground in the game, then noticing that I could pick it up, and there was a corresponding dot on a wall somewhere and if I was holding the dot I found, I could walk through that wall to a secret room.  It was awesome.  I felt exactly the way Halliday described feeling.

And so it went throughout the entire book.  Total nostalgiafest.

In Ready Player One, Halliday had developed a new interface with the online environment.  Originally designed for immersive 3D game play, Oasis quickly became the preferred way to interact in all online experiences. Of course, this made Halliday insanely wealthy.  He had no heirs when he died, so he designed a game to find a series of easter eggs in Oasis.  The first person to find all three would inherit Halliday's wealth, including a controlling stake in Oasis itself.

So much money was at stake that the game developed its own subculture ... people who dedicated themselves to becoming professional egg hunters, or Gunters as they came to be called.  Ready Player One is about one Gunter named Parzival and his group of friends who are racing against Innovative Online Industries, a corporate internet service provider that has hired and trained an elite group of Gunters in the hopes of winning the controlling interest in Oasis and making some extremely profitable (for them) changes.

There were a few things that bugged me.  James Halliday seemed to have an awful lot of "favorite" movies, books, games, whatever.  Like anytime Mr. Cline needed to explain how his characters solved a puzzle it was just, "Oh Halliday's favorite ~something~ was X and that explains it".  I swear he had five different favorite movies.  Two of Parzivals friends are from Japan and seemed somewhat strongly stereo typed.  I mean, maybe that was some meta-theme ... 80s culture plays a strong role in the book and in the 80s Japanese men were often portrayed with a certain bushido code stereotype, so maybe Parzivals friends were portrayed that same way to play up the 80s culture link. It still bugged me.  Finally, at one point Parzival suffered a very violent loss and yet seemed to just shrug it off.  It seemed unrealistically cool/detached or something.

But overall, the flaws were pretty minor and the fun was oh so much fun.  The characters were cool.  I cheered for them when they succeeded and got angry for them at IOI's dastardly deeds. The writing flows in a way that makes it a very quick read.  Thematically, the book has some depth.  It addresses issues of social interaction in a virtual world; extolling the importance of real world human contact, without devaluing the merits of virtual space.  Most of all, Ernest Cline's nostalgia-fu is strong.

Book Report: Salamandastron by Brian Jacques

A few years ago I read The Hobbit to Tabby.  A chapter or two at a time at bed time.  She liked it and wanted to read the Lord of the Rings, too, so I obliged.  Some ways into it I realized, "maybe these are a bit complex for a 6 year old."  But then Tabby would surprise me with comments like (after Gandalf told Frodo that he was convinced Gollum was alive for a reason), "I bet Frodo won't be able to destroy the ring, so it will be destroyed after Gollum steals it back."  Seriously!  Way back in book 1, in Moria, Tabby called the ending.  In any case, by the time I thought of maybe reading something else, Tabby was too involved in the story, too invested in the characters ... we had to finish.

Once we did I decided we'd try the Chronicles of Narnia.  Good call me.  They instantly became Tabby's favorite stories.

So as we were coming to the end of the Chronicles of Narnia, I was trying to figure out what to read next and remembered that our boys really liked the Redwall series by Brian Jacques when they were little.  Tabby loves animals ... seems like a good fit.  And another good call for me.  She has declared that they are her new favorites and we have to read them all.  Given that there are well over 20 books, that'll be a task.

We just finished our third book, Salamandastron.

The dreadful Dryditch Fever has struck Redwall Abbey, sickening almost everyone.  The otter Thrugg sets off on a quest to find the Icetor flowers required to cure the fever before any more Redwallers die.  The sword of Martin the Warrior was also stolen!  Samkim the squirrel and his best friend Arula the mole chase after the thieves.  Meanwhile, the badger maid Mara, adopted daughter of Urthsripe, Badger Lord of Salamandastron and commander of the Long Patrol, has run away, accompanied by her best friend Pickle the hare.  Soon after Mara leaves, the army of Ferhago the Assassin lays siege to Salamandastron.

Each story line is exciting and fun to read.  The stories of Samkim, Mara and the siege of Salamandastron all eventually come together in an epic climax.  The book is well written.  It touches on so many neat points of Redwall legend that it's a must read for anyone who enjoys the series.  Just for the pleasure of reading about the Long Patrol, visions granted by Martin the Warrior, Guossom shrews and badger traditions.

However, it is also more complex than the other Redwall books we've read.  The characters are likeable and engaging, easy to care about ... but there are just so darn many of them!  Four storylines!  One of them, saving Redwall from Dryditch Fever, even seems somewhat superflous.  I mean, it's a neat story ... but totally unrelated to the others.  Like it should have been in its own book.  Tabby constantly had me remind her who characters were and where we were going back and forth between story lines.

But I guess the important thing is that we did love the book.  We were happy at the end, cheering for the Redwallers, choking back tears of joy as everything turned out.

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms by George R. R. Martin

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is a collection of three short stories about Ser Duncan the Tall, a hedge knight in Westeros, and his squire, Egg.  It is the same setting as Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, but about 100 years before those events.

The first story is of Ser Duncan's first tourney and how Egg became his squire.  The second is about their service to an impoverished noble house dealing with a drought.  The third about another tourney to celebrate a wedding.  In each story there is, of course, a conflict and through each Duncan proves his valor as a Knight.  Given the author, I kept waiting for a hammer to drop, for something to go horribly wrong.  But each story ended happily ... or at least in a reasonable facsimile thereof.  The good guys win, anyway.

The book is well crafted.  Each story is its own, but with common themes throughout.  The characters are engaging and endearing.  The intrigues are fascinating.  The stories are fun and exciting.   I really enjoyed the book.  Whether or not you have read A Song of Ice and Fire, I recommend this one.

Book Review: Reamde by Neal Stephenson

Richard Forthrast has lived an interesting life.  Grew up in rural Iowa, ran to Canada to escape the draft, smuggled marijuana across the Idaho border, amassed enough money to eventually invest in an MMO (massively multiplayer online game).  He did so not so much because it was cool (though it was), but because he wanted a way to transfer money from the online environment to IRL.  It was wildly successful.

When his niece Zula visited him at his ski lodge in Canada, she brought her boyfriend, Peter, and that's where the twist happens that sets the book's plot.  Peter, an IT security specialist, had decided to make a quick, one time foray into crime.  He stole a bunch of credit card data and sold it to some Russians.  He just wanted enough money to pay off his upside down mortgage.  By a stroke of misfortune, the files containing the data were hijacked by a group of Chinese hackers using a virus called reamde that exploits Richard's MMO to launder money extorted to unlock the files.

From there the book gets all sorts of exciting.  I swear, Stephenson must have written this one with the intent of having it made into a movie or something. I would love to see that.  The story is incredible.  the characters so good.  This is a great book.

Flint, MI

Once you shrink government to the size you can drown it in a bathtub, apparently you get to drown it in lead laced water.

Book Report: Talisman by Stephen King and Peter Straub

Jack Sawyer's mother is dying of cancer.  And running from her late husband's business partner, though it's unclear why.  An old carney named Speedy sends Jack on a quest to an alternate world known as the Territories, a Narnia-esque place where evil is not nearly so pristine as new fallen snow, to retrieve a magical talisman that can save his Mom.  Of course he also discovers why they're running.

I've been meaning to read this book since high school.  My Dad was a Stephen King fan and at some point had the book sitting around.  I read fantasy novels, so it seemed like a good overlap.  I'm not sure why I never got around to it ... but I saw it in the library a few weeks ago and grabbed it.

It was well written. I liked the characters.  The story was kind of predictable.  The themes and imagery seemed liked they were just a rehashing of stories that have been told before.  I didn't impress me enough that I'm convinced to read Blackhouse, their follow up to Talisman, but I finished the book.  I've read both better and worse, but at least the writing was well crafted. I enjoyed reading it.

Saturday at the Shedd

Oh man, we had a spectacular weekend.

It started Friday when I took the day off so we could get on the road early for Milwaukee.  Spent the morning preparing for the trip.  At about 1:30, went and picked up Tabby & Ben from schools, then hit the road.

We picked up Jack as we drove by Sheboygan and arrived at Sam's place about supper time.  Becky, who had been preparing for the trip for weeks, had a lasagna to throw in the oven.  Sam put his finishing touches on our new computer.  We chatted for a bit.  Jack & I hit the store for some last minute items we'd forgotten then we all crashed for the night.

Saturday morning we were up early, ate breakfast and hit the road for Chicago.  Becky & I had given our family a trip to the Shedd for Christmas!  We tried finding deals online and found several "deals" that really didn't amount to much.  Best we found was that the cost of a Family Membership was $6 cheaper than full price, plus we could return any time this year for free!  And Becky saw so many cool photo ops as we drove through Chicago that she is just itchin' to go back for our anniversary.

We had a great time there.  I think the dolphin show was everyone's favorite, but there were a lot of cool displays.  We must have spent 15 minutes right off the bat taking pictures at the Caribbean tank.  We ate lunch at a booth right next to the Beluga whale display.  We walked through display after display until our legs ached too bad to go on ... and we didn't quite see it all.  Close .. but not quite all.

We stopped at Perkins for dinner just south of Milwaukee before dropping off Sam.

It turns out that Jack has been in the process of adopting a dog and its foster family was in West Allis, about 15 minutes from Sam's place.  So we stopped there on our way out of town to pick up a cute little Jack Russel Terrier mix named Annie.

The weather was kind of sloppy from about the time we left and threatened to get worse as we drove north.  Sure enough it did.  By them time we hit Sheboygan the roads were treacherous enough we just crashed for the night at Jack's place.

We had a nice leisurely Sunday morning and drove home on well cleared roads.  I spent most of the day setting up our new computer. Ben went in to work at 4:00.  Tabby & I went to Yoga at 6:00.

There were some bumps this weekend.  Our car died (temporarily), something went wrong with our computer while transferring files from the old drive and I had to reinstall Windows, the weather.  But you know, those were all overshadowed by the good times.  Yeah, it was a pretty spectacular weekend.