Rating: WARTY!
This audiobook, read decently by Will Wheaton, has a really cool title, but it also has far too many pop-culture geek references which not only seriously pigeon-hole (if not date) it, and it thereby misses the chance to be as good as it could have been. The author seems to take a conceited pride in how many references to obscure antique video games or movies or magazines he can make, but these are references which no one really cares about any more unless they're unhealthily addicted to the past.
I started out liking the story, which is set in 2044, and is about geek teenager Wade Watts aka Parsival, an addict of OASIS, who embarks upon a virtual quest, but I soon grew tired of these endless references which contributed nothing to moving the story. I think this serves potential writers well as a warning though: just because you're an addict of a given topic doesn't mean your readers will welcome being hammered with endless harping on it when there's (we hope!) a story to tell.
This book would also have been a lot tighter and moved better had the author not bloated it with ridiculous juvenile arguments between people about Ewoks and Ladyhawke and on and on. Seriously. A reference here and there is fine, but let's not write paragraphs of exposition about these things. It bogs down the story, turns a large number of potential readers off, and delivers you nothing but shallow street cred from a handful of fellow geeks.
The story itself promised to be good. A multi-billionaire game developer dies and leaves a video will offering his riches and a controlling interest in his game business to whoever can discover the 'Easter egg' he had left in his highly popular MMPORG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game). He offers one clue in the video, and the rest you have to find in the game.
Naturally this sparks huge interest, but little progress as the months and then years go by. Instead of having the opportunity to go into the game and follow clues, the first portion of the novel is taken up with pointless and meandering narration in first person. 1PoV isn't my favorite voice by any means. Here it's not too bad to begin with, but over time it starts to grate, as nothing happens and the disingenuous narrator, while claiming on the one hand to be an Über-Geek devotee of the game developer, seems to spend all his time in juvenile chat rooms dissing other people and indulging in bromance instead of playing the game in search of the Easter egg.
We learn of his passion for a female blogger, Artemis, who is also engaged in the hunt and has a three somewhere in her maim which is completely lost on the audio listener, and we read about her purportedly witty and entertaining blogs, but we never get to read one. In short, it's all tell and no show, the no-show being entertainment value, and it gets tiresome in short order. I can't recommend it.
