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