#4 Ready Player One by Ernst Cline 3.5 stars

2012: Being good at being dumb isn’t exactly a great achievement; if it were, I’d have been given the Nobel Prize for Physics years ago.

Dumb books aren’t as good as dumb movies.  If you’re going to consume something dumb for sheer pleasure, it’s best to remember that while books with sex and violence can be fun, when it comes to what the film critic Pauline Kael called the, ‘kiss, kiss, bang, bang’ stuff, movies and tv are where it’s at. 

And yet…. Ready Player One is a much better dumb book than it is a dumb movie.  Both novel and film are a reworking of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, golden tickets and all. This time a kid in 2045 is competing in a 1980’s themed computer simulation to win control of a corporate empire. On the page all of the pop culture references are fun and satisfying and yet none of the good stuff worked six years later when Steven Spielberg made a movie based on the book. Spielberg is a brilliant director and I sometimes forget to take the lens cap off of the camera on my iPhone, so how is it possible that the movie that played in my head while I read this was so much better than the one that Spielberg cooked up?  Honestly, how does such a talented director screw up a Marvin the Martian cameo? And don’t tell me it was Marvin’s fault. He’s been perfect in everything he’s done since he got out of rehab.

Being good at being dumb isn’t exactly the greatest achievement in the world; if it were, I’d have been given the Nobel Prize for Physics years ago.  I liked this book, but the fact that I kept envisioning a future film version while reading it isn’t a great sign. The words, ‘it’s a good book, but it would be a great movie’ is at heart an admission of defeat.  I don’t imagine the end of reading will come anytime soon, but I do still find it hard to imagine anyone seeing a so-so movie and thinking that it might make a pretty good book someday.