Ready Player One

If you are a fan of video games or the 80's culture in ANY form, this book will have great appeal. Written by Ernest Cline, this inaugural effort is set in a not-too-distant dystopic future, starting in the outskirts of Oklahoma City--of all places; that's where I grew up. Massive numbers of people are poor, jobless, prospect-less, and living in "stacks" which are these huge metal grid structures with every manner of RV and trailer slotted into often 20+ story high-rises. Many people escape the ugly reality by spending time in The Oasis, an elaborate online virtual world freely available to anyone with internet access. Seventeen-year old Wade Watts also attends school there, and when he is not in "school" he is playing games, hanging out in best friend Aech's chat room, or monitoring the blog of his fantasy girl, Artemis. But the creator of the Oasis has died and left his fortune to whoever can solve a series of puzzles which involve finding keys and then opening gates. Knowledge and skill are required and Wade is one among millions who intend to get to the prize first. A mega-corporation that wants to commercialize The Oasis has also hired hundreds of people to try and solve the puzzle and they have enormous advantages, both technology and money wise. Years have passed without anyone finding the first key, and then Wade does. The lengths to which the corporation will go to win include murdering the leading competitors, and as Wade (aka Parzival), Aech and Artemis learn, they may have to abandon their lone wolf approaches to survive. Read this book for my SF-Fantasy book group and thoroughly enjoyed it. The good guys (and gals) win in the end. There are more detailed plot descriptions in  reviews from the New York Times and Booklist and Powell's.