Review: Ready Player One – Ernest Cline

As I mentioned a few days ago, I downloaded the audio book version of Ready Player One by Ernest Cline.  I finished it on Tuesday morning, which is pretty quick for a 16 hour book.  I spent a good chunk of my weekend playing Super Mario 64 and listening to the book, which was a great combo.

I like to think of Ready Player One as a Charlie and the Chocolate Factory for quips nerd culture. I thought Ready Player One very enjoyable to listen to, Will Wheaton did a good job narrating the story and gave a good voice to the stories main character.

Ready Player One follows the exploits of Wade Watts, user name Parzival, in a near future where the world has used up most of its natural resources and now relies on a immersive gaming experience called the Oasis.  The creator of the Oasis, James Halliday, user name Anorak, created a challenge in the game near the end of his life by hiding an Easter egg in the video game in the form of a quest related to his interests, which were classic video games, science fiction and fantasy, and classic rock.  The prize for finding the egg? Halliday’s entire inheritance, the billions of dollars of revenue for the Oasis.

The book starts with Wade 5 years after the quest is announced, living in a trailer park known as the stacks, living in poverty and working his way through school.  Egg hunters, or Gunters, have devoted their lives to finding the egg, spending countless hours every day researching the interests of Halliday and searching the countless worlds stored in the Oasis.  Because of his lack of funding, Wade is not able to explore past the starting world of his virtual high school.

By a strange turn of luck, Wade is the first Gunter to find the first clue.  Wade eventually becomes famous through the process.  Wade makes friends with the other Gunters who are able to make it through the challenges, and they begin to face the challenge of competing with a technology corporation that is attempting to win the challenge to acquire control of the Oasis. The employees of this corporation are known as Sixers, due to their user names being 6 didget employee codes.

The competition intensifies through the hunt for the multiple keys and clues to find the egg, and eventually climaxes in an all out war between the Sixers and the Gunters at the location of the final gate.

I enjoyed the story very much, even though I don’t usually go in for young adult fiction.  There were a few issues I found with the story telling method, mainly, I found the voice used for the teenage characters a bit oversimplified, including lots of cliches and stereotypes.  The book also contained many extensive explanations about things like classic Atari and computer systems, descriptions of role playing game formats, and 80s pop culture. Which, if you didn’t have any previous knowledge, it would be very helpful, but as someone who has an extensive knowledge of the 1980s, it was a bit redundant and seemed unnecessary. One other note would be that there were a few references that were a good deal late for a 1980s focused story line, namely references to Firefly and Stargate.

As a whole, Ready Player One was a very solid book, which I would recommend to anyone interested in 1980s or nerd culture.

Ready player one: 7.5/10
Availbile on Amazon http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0307887448/ref=tmm_pap_title_0?ie=UTF8&sr=&qid=

Know your monster!

Hey guys, or should I say, Boo!

Sorry. I really am. I’m just getting into the Halloween spirit, if you’re at a party in DC this year and see a very disoriented Bojack horseman, that’s probably me. (I’ll be disoriented because Those masks are hard to see out of!)

I’ve been dabbling in monster and fae related literature lately, Dresden, Sookie Stackhouse, James lovegroves’ Redlaw, the walking dead novels, and season 10 of supernatural of course.  But I’ve noticed a growing trend, there’s a lot of different kinds of creatures that happen to share the same name.

  Before we move on, I’d like to give warning, this is a fantasy heavy blog post, so if you don’t like fantasy, click away now or be subjected to a barrage of magical beings.

My investigstion began about a week ago, when a friend and I were arguing the necessary qualities of an elf. This began because I told her that I didn’t like elves in Skyrim, due to their strange looks. My friend told me that was absurd, elves didn’t have to be beautiful, and pointed out Santa’s elves,  the shoemaker elves, and the keebler elves. My reasoning was that those are hardly the standard elves, and would be considered more gnomeish by today’s fantasy standards.

My first real encounter with divergent types of fantasy characters were the vampires in magic the gathering.  In the Zendikar block, vampires are a dark, tribal race of blood suckers. Two years later in Innistrad, they were re introduced as a aristocracy that held humans in terror of their power. So what’s the difference?

The difference is how you write your characters.  It’s no secret, fae, zombies, and monsters are still in the spotlight of trendy literature.  One of the big tricks to writing a well thought out story is making sure you know your characters.  If your zombies are the result of a voodoo witch doctor, don’t use the characteristics of world wide disease zombies. (See Age of Voodoo by James Lovegrove.) If your werewolves are actually sharpshifters, they don’t need to worry about the full moon (Fool Moon by Jim Butcher explains 4 varieties of werewolves.)  if fae are a parallel race of beings, they need to be more unified than if vampires and fairies and demons are separate races (Lost Girl vs. Supernatural.)

My overall point is, make the creature you write your own. Don’t rely on others explanation of how a race operates, unless of course you’re deciding to make vampires not drink blood. That’s just crazy talk.

Until next time

-Josh

The Merits of Audio Books

Hey readers,

What do you think of audio books?  I’ve had very little experience with them to be honest.  Most of my books come from discount used book stores, (which Washington DC and Northern Virginia have plenty of, much to my delight.) so I don’t often purchase audio books.

Traditionally, audio books are very pricey, mostly due to materials and production, a new mass market or trade paperback is much more economical than purchasing an 6-10 disk set of a book, and honestly all those disks are a pain to deal with.  This weekend I decided to experiment with audible. About 15 dollars a month after your free trial gets you a new audio book a month, so around 15 dollars an audio book.  I have not yet paid the monthly subscription, but the free audio book I decided to start with has been great.  I downloaded Ready Player One as read by Will Wheaton.  The audio book is recorded in great quality, and runs about 16 hours total.  It’s been great, I listen to it on the metro, at home while playing video games, and before I go to bed. Near the end of the month I’ll have to decide if it’s worth it to keep up with it and keep listening but for now I’ll keep enjoying the story.

Do you use audio books? What do you think? where do you get yours? Let me know in the comments!

Cheers

-Josh

Weekly Wrap up 10/5-10/11

Today I’ll be at the Maryland renaissance faire all day with a few friends, this is the first time I’ll ever be attending a ren faire so I’m really excited!

I decided to do a weekly wrap up of what I’ve been reading this week, I’ve mostly been working on some light stuff during the job hunt, Installments in series I’m working on/just starting. (If you don’t know me, I have a horrible habit of starting countless series and rarely finishing them.)

So here are the books!

Storm Front – Jim Butcher (The Dresden Files #1) Rating: 8/10

This was my first encounter with Butcher, downloaded it one day on my phone during a long metro ride and read nearly half the first day and finished it the next.  Very fast paced, and generally enjoyable.

For anyone else who is new to the world of Dresden, it’s a pretty crazy world.  Butcher sets up a very diverse urban fantasy setting sprawling with wizards, witches, vampires, and the like,  The main character, Harry Dresden, is a wizard for hire, and his first documented case is a missing person with a twist.

Dead as a Doornail – Charlaine Harris (Sookie Sackhouse/True Blood #5) Rating: 6.5/10

I’ve been working on this series since the middle of summer whenever I needed a lighter escape, and it definitely provides that.  Note to readers, the series is far tamer than the television series.  Foul language is very minimal, and the graphic sexual encounters of the show are nowhere to be found. The series is still a light PG-13, but not the erotic piece depicted on HBO.

The 5th installment of the Southern Vampire Mysteries focuses on the aftermath of the “Witch War” from book 4, and is a bit slower.  There is some development for the overall series, but it definitely lacks the excitement of the previous volume.

Lullaby – Chuck Palanhiuk  (2002) Rating: 9/10

Certainly the highlight of my reading this week, Chuck’s 5th book wraps up what I consider to be the golden age of his work.  Fight club, Survivor, Invisible Monsters, and Choke were all written before Lullaby, and are all some of my favorite pieces of his work.  Ever since Beautiful You, Chuck’s 18th publication, received a release date, I have been trying to finish off the rest of his books.

Lullaby is a dark, unexpected urban fantasy to rival the best in the game.  It includes all the charm, or anti-charm that can be expected from a Palahniuk book.  Lullaby follows a slightly more conventional path than other Palanhiuk books, but the subject matter, a mix of journalism, serial murder, and witchcraft, is just as outlandish as any other title.  Certainly one of his best works, I would sincerely recommend it to anyone interested in his work.

(Note: I bought this one on Amazon and Got a really cool Advance Reading copy, I really like the cover art, shown above.)

Those are the novels I’ve finished this week, but I’ve also read a handful of Charles Bukowski poems (see my post on that here) as well as this month’s issue of National Geographic, which had some really interesting material on genetically engineered crops and Monsanto.  I’m also currently listening to Ready Player One on audiobook, read by Will Wheaton (stay tuned for a full review, I’m loving it.)

Thats all for now readers, Hope you enjoyed the reviews, Agree? Disagree? Let me know! Also feel free to comment with any suggestions of what I should read next.  Until next time,

Cheers.

-Josh

8 Rules for Creative Writing, and why Your Blog Should be Following Them

One of my all time favorite authors is Kurt Vonnegut.  I read the book Cat’s Cradle in 10th grade on the recommendation of a friend, (to be completely honest, it was a girl, and I was trying to impress her.)  The book had a profound impact on my life, and really opened me up to deeper, more complex books, before that, the majority of my reading was science fiction/fantasy or stock classics, not that there is anything wrong with either of these genres, I still have much love for both, but I was ushered into a world of books that stretched my mind in ways I didn’t know were possible.

Kurt Vonnegut passed away in 2007, a few years before I had my first encounter with his work.  I was never able to ask him how to make my writing better, but he once provided some advice in an essay called “Creative Writing 101″ which can be found in the posthumous collectionBamboo Snuffbox. The highlight of this essay was a list of rules for creative writing, which are as follows:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

The greatest American short story writer of my generation was Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964). She broke practically every one of my rules but the first. Great writers tend to do that.

These Rules are essentially what shapes modern fiction.  No longer are stories written to meet word count quotas, instead, readers are looking for someone who can tell them a story quickly, connect with them, and entertain them.  Why should your blog be any different?

Cheers

-Josh

The problem with poetry

I don’t read a lot of poetry.

There a few poets that really get my attention, Walt Whitman and Charles Bukowski mainly. Their ability to say so much in such a small space is profound.

I prefer novels because I like the ability to keep reading, 10, 50, 100 pages at a time. With poetry, I can only read one or two at a time, and then I have to sit and ponder, because so much power was conveyed in a single page that it would overpower me if I continued to read. 

I’ve been working on Bukowski’s What matters most is how you walk through the fire for about two months now.  Today I read a pair of poems on his childhood during the great depression, and his view of the world during the events. The beauty of the work was profound. 

Bukowski is known for being a dirty old man, but even dirty old men were once children, children who observed a broken world with a sense of wonder and hope.

So that’s what I think of poetry, it’s not that I’m against it, it’s just That I can’t handle it quit yet.

The names of the poems, if you would like to find and read them, are my father and the bum and legs, hips and behind.

Cheers.

-Josh

And the Nobel Prize goes to…

Every year the Nobel Prize in literature is awarded to an outstanding author, notable past winners include Günter Grass, Toni Morrison, William Golding, and my personal favorite, Gabriel García Márquez.  The Nobel Prize, in addition to it’s esteem, currently garnishes prize money totaling 8 million SEK, or approximately $1.2 million US dollars.

This year’s winner, French author Patrick Modiano, is not one I am familiar with, As is the case with most readers.  A poll on the Nobel Prize website remarked that only 7% of voters had read his work.  I will certianly be diving into his work in the near future.  Quoting the Nobel Prize website, “The Nobel Prize in Literature  2014 was awarded to Patrick Modiano ‘for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation'”.   

Some of Modiano’s popular works include Missing Person, Honeymoon, and Out of the dark. All available on amazon.

The Nobel Prize in literature is usually overshadowed in the public eye by the Nobel Peace prize, who many believe will be awarded to Pope Francis later today.

-Josh