A book I have been anxious to finish for a while now is Ready Player One, a sci fi adventure by Fanboys screenwriter and first time novelist Ernest Cline. I’ve been waiting for one of those luxurious weekends when there is nothing else to do but sit in my wing chair beside my bookshelf and read. And it just might be this weekend.

It’s 2044 and high school student Wade Watts is stuck in a bleak future. He copes by hanging out in the Oasis, a virtual reality world where he can go to school, game and essentially escape his life living in the “stacks”, the name given to trailer-park-like neighbourhoods on the edge of cities where the decrepit trailers are stacked to take up less real estate.  When the eccentric creator of the Oasis, James Halliday, died five years before, he left behind a massive fortune but no heir.  In a pre-taped message a virtual Halliday revealed that hidden throughout the Oasis are a series of puzzles. Solve all the puzzles and win the right to decide how Halliday’s fortune is spent.  Treasurer seekers must use their knowledge of the 80′s gaming and pop culture that Halliday grew up with to solve the puzzles. After five years, nobody has found even the first key and although half the population of the world took up the search initially, most have now returned to their mundane lives. A few, known as “gunters” continue to search, becoming experts on Halliday and 80′s pop culture in the process. With no parents, no money, hardly any food but at least the standard issue gear required to enter the Oasis, Wade has spent his time becoming an expert on all things Halliday including mastering the games also available in the Oasis that Halliday so loved during his youth. Against all odds Wade finds the first key. When his name, thankfully an alias, is announced to the public the stakes to find the rest of the clues go up. He is now competing against players working for massive corporations dedicated to securing Halliday’s fortune who will stop at nothing to find it. It will take all of Wade’s knowledge and gaming skill to virtually and possibly even literally survive.  So far the book hasn’t become too cheesy, too ambitious or too unbelievable. And readers I trust assure me Ready Player One is a good read all the way through.

You will like this book if you grew up in the 80′s or your parents did. You will like this book if you like playing video games. You will like this book if you are a fan of the “holy trilogy” movies as Wade calls them… Star Wars, Back to the Future, Indiana Jones (the fourth movie according to Wade doesn’t count but I liked it). Lord of the Rings, and the Matrix. You will like this book if you secretly (or even un-secretly) listen to old 80′s rock and pop songs. You will like this book if you sometimes worry about our future here on earth.

I first became aware of Ready Player One through various twitter posts of writers and self proclaimed geeks I admire including Wil Wheaton, of Star Trek TNG, Stand By Me and The Big Bang Theory fame. Wil went on to narrate the audio version of the book.

I bought that version for my son and purchased two library copies which have been making the rounds among gaming and tech types at my school. I have been reading Ready Player One on my new eReader and in book form, keeping my feet, like the main characters in the book, in both the past and the future.

I’m at the point now where I want to delve into the story and immerse myself in the amazing Oasis that Cline has created and like Wade Watts not come out until I”m done…

See you on the other side?

As much as I love working in my library it is tough sometimes seeing all those books just begging to be read and knowing that a lot of them will have to be put on my summer reading list.

This was book one on my list:

Wonder, the third book in the WWW trilogy written by Robert J. Sawyer. The series, Sawyer’s first aimed at a YA as well as adult audience, also includes Wake and Watch. I really enjoyed the first two novels which chronicle the relationship between a blind teen named Caitlin and the internet, but not just the internet as we know it. It’s an internet that has managed to gain consciousness.  Caitlin aptly dubs him – they together decide its not an “it” -as Webmind.  She discovers Webmind, which she sees as a series of interconnected coloured lines or networks, with the help of an experimental device designed to help her see. First only able to communicate with Caitlin, by book three of the series Webmind is befriending people around the world. Sawyer, as in all of his amazing science fiction books, deftly mixes reality, science and fiction to make Webmind’s birth and the resultant excitement and sometimes furour his existence causes as entirely believable. Wonder can be read alone but I would recommend reading all three books in the series. Based in the real tech environment of Waterloo, Ontario the series is fast paced, suspense filled and peppered  with science, math and cultural references. Sawyer’s good-natured humour also shines through the WWW series. Sawyer has a knack for painting a realistic, positive version of what the world could be, an inspiring change from the dystopian worlds depicted in many science fiction novels. I have recommended the series with success to adult and teen readers but it especially appeals to students, particularly girls,  interested in math, science and computers. I suppose I’m a little biased as Robert J. Sawyer is already my favourite author, but Wonder is now my favourite book.

Just watched the movie “Becoming Jane”. I rented it after deciding to take home all of Jane Austen’s books from my library over the summer to read. Not sure why I haven’t read them before, but, if you’re looking for inspiration to read these classics, watching the movie might just do the trick.  I’ve had several students check out Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility after watching the movies. The DVD releases of “Becoming Jane” and “The Jane Austen Book Club” have prompted interest in Austen’s other works as well.

“Becoming Jane” takes a semi-biographical look at Jane Austen’s beginnings as a writer during a time when it was unheard of for a woman to “live by her pen” and women were expected to marry for money rather than love. The bonus features on the DVD reveal that the story depicted in the movie  is an embellishment of Jane’s real life.  However, Jane did actually meet and fall in love with a man with the same name as the male lead. Anne Hathaway plays Jane and as a self-proclaimed Austen fan apparently does an excellent job of capturing the real author’s character. The supporting cast and beautiful sets and costumes also make the film well worth watching. The story gives insight into how Austen gathered the themes for her novels and, well, to say much more would be to say too much.

“The Jane Austen Book Club” is a modern-day film about a book club made up of  a recently separated mother, her close female friends, her daughter and a younger man recently introduced to their circle who previously only read sci-fi/fantasy books. Having just started reading Jane Austen and being a sci-fi/fantasy reader myself, I enjoyed watching the male character’s growing appreciation of Jane Austen’s works over the course of the movie. The underlying relationship plots interwoven with details about the relationship woes of Austen’s characters made it a fun popcorn movie while inspiring viewers to consider reading all six of Austen’s novels and other works.  At least it inspired me.  So, back to reading… oh, Mr. Darcy, how could you?

For now, you can check out my summer blog.

In Defence of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto by Michael Pollan is a welcome and long-overdue addition to the myriad of books available on food issues. Its greatest appeal will be to those people who are tired of trying to explain why they don’t drink pop, why they spend a lot of time in the grocery store reading labels on food products, and why they cook “from scratch” instead of using food that comes in boxes.

These people, like me, will like this book because it will let them know that they were right all along – - that the longer the list of ingredients on a food product the further it is away from being real food, and, the more likely it will make them or their children still hungry minutes after eating it, or, worse, tired, irritable, or sick.

A journalist who first examined food issues in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Pollan in this, his latest book, puts the Western diet under a microscope, discovering that “food has been replaced by nutrients and common sense by confusion”. Delving deeper into the history of “nutritionism” and the industrialization of eating, Pollan attempts to explain why Western society, with supposedly the means and knowledge to eat well and thrive, somehow isn’t.

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