Actual Rating: 4.5 stars 
 Woah, I seriously did not expect to like this book as much as I did. Were it not for the hype, I would have been perfectly content to never pick up Ready Player One. Something about the summary and cover was just not appealing to me. It might have something to do with the fact that I've never been that big on video games. Oh, there are definitely at least a few I love on all different consoles. But still, mostly I don't play a lot. Basically I'm just really glad I gave this a shot. Normally I'm very good at judging what I'll like and what I won't, so this book is the first in a very long time to genuinely surprise me so much. 
 Ready Player One doesn't waste time - immediately after starting, it begins talking all about James Donovan Halliday and the contest he set up before his death. I was pretty much sucked in from the start, as the writing was very engaging. There's a lot of detail to this Egg Hunt of Halliday's, and the author did a great job of slowly moving things along, revealing bits and pieces of information at a time. This book easily could have contained massive amounts of info-dump that would have slowed the plot quite a bit and made it less fun in general. But instead I was treated to a well crafted story, which was awesome. 
 The prize at the end of this contest, of course, is Halliday's massive billion(s) dollar fortune. And in a dying, depressing world, that kind of money could do a lot of good in the hands of the right person. I felt pretty disconnected from Wade for a good chunk of the story, but that's not really his fault. Mostly I was just interested in the contest - finding the keys, clearing the gates, getting the egg and so on. Wade just happened to be the eyes I was looking (er, reading) through. After a bit though I began to actually like him. I sympathized with his awkwardness around real people and admired his determination to see this thing through no matter what. His narration was funny at times, and really sweet in others - mostly when he spoke of Art3mis. Honestly it would be hard not to give him credit - he seriously went to a lot of trouble studying everything and anything connected to James Halliday. 
 The world itself was exquisite. The OASIS was described as a video games with complex rules and order I could totally picture in my head. I loved the way magic and technology was set up and learning about the planets and powerful artifacts. It also seems very realistic that the real world would be abandoned this way if something like this was ever created. I also really liked that the IOI villains had some depth. Cline could have made the corporation a big mysterious presence throughout the book, but we're given a solid bad guy to hate in Ready Player One in the form of Sorrento. 
 The whole book is leading up to what feels like a very big climax, so I was hoping for something really cool. It became impossible to put down around that time as there was a really big showdown indeed. Wade's friends - the side characters - were great. Hopefully this book gets turned into a movie at some point, because I think it'd adapt to the big screen pretty well. The plot did lag slightly in the middle, when Wade lost focus on the contest for a while, but that's the only reason I deducted half a star.