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