Ernest Cline’s “ Ready Player One ” is a book filled with references to video games, virtual reality, ’80s pop-culture trivia, geek heroes like E. Gary Gygax, and funny-sounding cult items like Frobozz and Raaka-Tu. Yet it works for people who like books without pictures too. Mr. Cline is photographed on the jacket standing in front of an open-flapped DeLorean, like the one in “Back to the Future.” He looks a bit like the filmmaker Kevin Smith, one of the few people on the planet who may be capable of catching all of Mr. Cline’s geekoid references. (Mr. Cline himself wrote the screenplay for the 2009 film “Fanboys,” about unusually fanatical “Star Wars” devotees.) Another is the science-fiction writer John Scalzi, who has aptly referred to “Ready Player One” as a “nerdgasm.” There can be no better one-word description of this ardent fantasy artifact about fantasy culture. With its Pac-Man-style cover graphics and vintage Atari mind-set “ Ready Player One ” certainly looks like a genre
Why I Love Reading Real Books I read novels online every 2 weeks or so, which adds up to about 25 books per year. As a rule, I always read at least free books online every day. Often it is a lot more than that. I squeeze reading in whenever I can?—?primarily weeknights before bed and then throughout the weekend. Of course this pales in comparison to some notable voracious readers, such as Bill Gates (50+ books per year) and Warren Buffett (500+ pages per day). I read books primarily to learn, grow, and feed my curiosities. This means that I mostly read non-fiction books about my passions of personal development, healthy lifestyle, and business/marketing. While I certainly learn every day on the job, books are a gateway to deeper knowledge within my profession and a way to dive into areas unrelated to my day job. My personality is best-suited to deep exploration of a limited number of subjects, rather than casually flipping from topic to topic. Therefore I greatly prefer reading full