Harriton readers, take note of a new gem in our library. In the New York Times bestseller, Ready Player One, author Ernest Cline sends readers on a ‘genre-busting’ journey of adventure, love, and ‘80s video games.

The year? 2044.

The place? Planet Earth, a dystopian world full of all the disasters one can name.

The hero? Wade Watts, who, like most of the human race, escapes reality by living inside a virtual universe called the OASIS, created by James Halliday.

His mission? Win the contest to end all contests, and inherit Halliday’s entire fortune… by finding and solving three puzzles that the whole world has been unable to unlock.

To figure out the puzzles of the Copper, Jade, and Crystal Keys, players must become experts on all facets of the pop culture of the 1980s, the decade of Halliday’s youth.  From music to TV shows to video games (Wade’s specialty), egg hunters, or ‘gunters’, study even the most obscure facts about Halliday’s favorite media to find his Easter egg, the hidden object that will allow them to win. Their avatar forms in the OASIS give them the freedom to appear in any form, human or otherwise, as they travel a gigantic, super-realistic universe of custom-made planets.

However, Wade and the other gunters who gain their knowledge through time and work have to face a villainous corporation determined to cheat its way to the top. If they find the egg first, Innovative Online Industries (IOI) plans to use the money to turn the OASIS into a corporate playground. Users who once had compared their right to experience the OASIS to the right to look up at the sky would be forced to pay monthly fees, reveal their real-life identities, and stare at worlds plastered with ads.

It’s only logical, then, that IOI wants to kill Wade (literally) when he is the first to find the Copper Key and go through the Copper Gate.

As his avatar, Parzival, Wade must solve Halliday’s riddles before IOI comes to the door, deal with a blossoming romance with fellow gunter Art3mis (pronounce it like Artemis, n00bs), and discover after epic virtual battles and brain-busting quests that sometimes reality is where the magic really is.

Every one of the 372 pages of Ready Player One was worth the time it took to read. Even for a non-gamer and total ‘80s novice, the book was accessible and exhilarating. Cline’s twists made trying to predict the next sequence of events impossible, and his clear love for his geeky subjects showed in the knowledgeable descriptions of games and mythologies.

However, with barely a breath between tricky riddles, dangerous confrontations with IOI, and gleefully geeky dissertations on ‘80s pop culture, the human connections between Wade, his best friend Aech, and Art3mis were comfortingly familiar and just as intriguing as the levels and powerups.

Wade’s eventual real-life confrontation with Aech, and the secret Aech is concealing, is perhaps one of the most surprising and heartwarming parts of Ready Player One. After the shock is over, Wade thinks, “[W]e’d known each other for years, in the most intimate way possible. We’d connected on a purely mental level. I understood [Aech]… as a dear friend. None of that had changed…”

The concept of an apocalyptic world where humans escape their real problems through virtual existence is both intriguing and disturbing for its parallels to present day. The simulated events in the OASIS occupy many more pages in the book than events in real life do, and they are often so absorbing that they are more memorable and substantial than the real occurrences.

How often have you checked your Facebook profile or texted your friends and gotten lost in the screen, forgetting life outside the keyboard? Have you ever missed an opportunity for face-to-face conversation because you were busy IMing? Cline suggests that technology can bring incredible advances to humanity, but it can also distract us from the greatest game of all – life.

Wade learns this when he meets Art3mis in real life for the first time, and the book ends with his thought: “It occurred to me then that for the first time in as long as I could remember, I had absolutely no desire to log back into the OASIS.”

Ready Player One boasts a snarky yet determined narrator, a richly imagined plot, and a world you will always want to log back into for its implications for our lives and its overall brilliance.