Ready Player One - Ernest Cline

In Ready Player One, it is 2044, and for many people living of the dying planet Earth, a virtual reality world called OASIS has become reality. What started as a VRMMORPG (virtual reality massively multiplayer online role playing game) has become a way of life. Schools in the real world are overpopulated, so much of the population attends class in OASIS. Instead of flying across the world, business executives hold conferences and meeting in OASIS chat rooms.
If this sounds like science fiction that isn't possible until 2044, it shouldn't because this is all beginning to happen right now. In 2006, Nintendo released the Wii, and started to blur the line between reality and virtual reality. Now, in just one year, the Oculus Rift, a virtual reality headset, will be released, and with it, a change in the way our society works. While it was originally conceived for video games, like OASIS, it will also have many practical uses. In an instant with  you can put on your headset and if it is connected to a 360 degree camera, you can basically put yourself anywhere you could imagine like an important meeting or a family meet up that you couldn't attend in person.
While the Earth is fine at the moment, it wouldn't be absurd to imagine a distant future where global warming or war could ravage the planet and make people want to turn for virtual reality as an escape. In Ready Player One, the main character Wade Watts lives with his Aunt and about 15 other people in a stack of RVs. Overpopulation has led to the creation of these stacks of RVs. Long story short, the world in this story is not pretty.
In the book, OASIS was created by James Halliday, and after he died, he released a video, almost a will, telling players about an easter egg he had secretly programmed into OASIS, and whoever found it would get his entire estate and control of OASIS. Factions are formed, and the main villain, IOI a corporation working to take control of OASIS is formed.
Overall, Ready Player One was a fun, easy, not to deep read which was very enjoyable, but not really to profound, except for it's setting which made it stand out among other near future science fiction.
My biggest problem with the book are the pop culture "references". I put reference in quotation marks because in video games, you can find many easter eggs relating to pop culture, and what makes these easter eggs so fun is finding out what they are a reference to. For in example, in Demon's Souls, the first video game in the Souls franchise, there is an npc called Patches the Hyena. In the spiritual sucessor, there is an npc called "Trusty" Patches, and finally in Bloodborne, you can meet Patches the Spider. All three characters have the same voice actor, and reference Patches the Hyena, the original, but they don't explicity tell you it's a reference. In Ready Player One it spells out all of it's references very obviously. One of the characters has a ship called the Bebop, a pretty obvious reference to Cowboy Bebop, but instead of simply dropping the name, creating an easter egg for the people who watch Cowboy Bebop, Cline points it out and it becomes less of a hunt and more of a random name drop of a show that Cline like.
Despite a few small nitpicks I had, Ready Player One is still an enjoyable read, if a little predictable and simple.
Ready Player One's Page Count: 384
My Total Page Count: 2119

Stephen King vs H.P. Lovecraft (Misery and a The Complete Fiction of H.P. Lovecraft)

Reading a Stephen King story has always been a weird experience for me. People often hail him as one of the greatest horror writers of all time, but his novels have never really made me disturbed, unnerved, or horrified. It's hard to explain, but there's something about King's voice and style that has always made it hard for me to be scared by his writing. Perhaps the biggest problem I have with King is how explicit and to the point his stories are. I find it odd that people often say that horror novels scare them more then horror movies or games because it allows them to project their own fears into the story and imagine what is most terrifying to them, but then cite King as a master of horror.

King's writing often leaves very little to the imagination or is simply not interesting enough to make you want to try to visualize what is happening in his book. 

In Misery, Annie Wilkes is scary because she preforms unpredictable  acts of violence that put Paul in danger. The reason that this doesn't particularly scare me is because there are only ever two real possible outcomes for Paul; he can either somehow escape Annie and live or stay with her and continue to write Misery Chastain novels until Annie inevitably snaps and kills him. This lack of real mystery or ambiguity is why novels like Misery don't scare me as much as short stories by my personal favorite horror author, H.P. Lovecraft.
At this point, click on this link to listen to a song that perfectly captures the way that reading Lovecraft stories makes me feel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaM9YRUsDXs

Lovecraft's stories have everything that I love about horror and make me feel uncomfortable and insignificant. While King's stories are more straightforward, Lovecraft is about the unknown, and how fragile human sanity is. Despite being far older than King novels, many of Lovecraft's stories like The Call of Cthulhu have themes that are more relevant to modern society like the idea of humans discovering something that they shouldn't.

Lovecraft deals with the unknown as well as the unknowable; malevolent forces so powerful that simply trying to comprehend then would make a person go insane. This idea of the unknowable is what really sticks out to me and terrifies me. While reading his stories, I almost felt like I was being watched. Lovecraft's stories have this ethereal, omnipotent tone to them that make you feel powerless and tiny. Many people love King because his horror is down to Earth and human, but Lovecraft's stories make you realize how petty and insignificant human issues are when compared, to the vast, ever expanding, and mysterious universe which surely has other worlds or creatures in it which would be impossible for a human to comprehend.

I know that at the end of the day, different people find different things scary, but my point in writing this was to try to explain why I think Stephen King is overrated by explaining the kind of horror that impacts me the most. For me, King's style of horror will never impact me the way that Lovecraft's does.
Misery's Page Count: 352
H.P. Lovecraft The Complete Fiction Page Count(I kind of skipped around and didn't read every story, but it was somewhere around...): 700
My Total Page Count: 1735

The Things They Carried - Tim O'Brien

The Things They Carried  is an amazing book. There are no two ways about it. Unless someone hates media that isn't exactly lighthearted, I can't think of any real reasons to dislike this book (not to say that it's perfect). What I really appreciated about this book was how honest it was, despite having whole chapters of the book dedicated to telling the reader not to believe everything they are told; even if whole parts of the book were made up, I would still appreciate it's honesty. Not because it's a completely accurate retelling of what actually happened, but because it never glorifies the war for better or worse. No leaders giving an emotional speech during a battle, no crying over every characters corpse, just the honest brutality of war.

Book's Page Count: 233

My Total Page Count: 683

The Princess Bride - William Goldman

Over winter break I started to read a book that I've been wanting to check out for a while: The Princess Bride. It had been years since I'd seen the movie so I figured that I might as well check out the book that it was based on. When reading it, I could clearly see the same type of humor that was used int the movie, as well as an additional layer of meta humor that made it extremely fun to read. It reminded me of something like the historian murder mystery subplot in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. From the way that Goldman credits himself as the person who abridged the book, to the little sections that he writes with his voice injected, it added a little something that I honestly loved about the book. Overall, it's timeless story, funny love able characters, and meta humor made The Princess Bride a great read.

Book's Page Count: 450

My Total Page Count: 450

Second Semester Intro

I am hoping to have a more organized blog this semester with more consistent posts and reading times. I read in a lot of large chunks last semester and started a lot of my posts but didn't finish then until around the end of the semester. Hopefully by doing this, my posts won't be as rushed and I can revise them more before I post them. I am going to read at least 2,000 pages this semester, but I am going to try to go a little beyond that and shoot for 2,500 pages. To accomplish this goal I an hoping to read several books including, but not limited to, Yogworld by Yahtzee Croshaw, All You Need Is Kill by Ryōsuke Takeuchi, and some of the books that I considered reading last semester but didn't get around to.

Jurassic Park - Michael Crichton

Jurassic Park is one of the most enjoyable, thrilling, and captivating books I have ever read. It is the perfect blend of fantasy, science fiction, and even a little horror. One thing that the movie failed to capture was how smart Jurassic Park actually is. From the seemingly plausible way of cloning dinosaurs that it presents, to the the complex computer system throughout the park, the book is full of unique ways to present it's science fiction ideas. It even manages to strike the reader with almost as much terror and awe in it's descriptions of the dinosaurs(the only thing it's missing is John Williams magnificent score). While it may be more close in plot to the movie than something like The Shining and it's movie adaptation, the general tone is vastly different, the book being a more serious and scientific thriller while the movie, as great as it is, being more of a summer blockbuster. There is something in this book for everyone, and as such should be read by everyone who likes thrillers and science fiction. 

Verdict: Buy it.

Book's Page Count: 464

My Total Page Count: 2168

Foundation - Isaac Asimov

For this post, I am writing a simple and quick 'should you read' type short review for the first book in the Foundation trilogy. In short, yes, you should read Foundation. It definitely isn't one of my favorite books, but I can see how it's ideas have impacted science fiction as a whole. But I have many of the same gripes with it as I have with Brave New World. In both books, the info-dumping and exposition and is horrible and not exactly entertaining. I will say that I did find Foundation to be more enjoyable because I actually liked some of the characters and story arcs, even though they were only around for small portions of the book. It really is the perfect example of a space odyssey. Everything about the book felt somewhat epic and grandiose, and even if it wasn't exactly thrilling, it is a must read, at least once, for people who want to read some of the greatest and most influential science fiction of all time.
Verdict: Rent it.
Book's Page Count: 296
My Total Page Count: 1704