This was a great read, though it loses a star for all the infodumps for world-building in the beginning, as well as some in the middle too. Oh, and don't read anything into the fact it took me a couple of weeks to read it. I actually didn't want to put it down, but I had other obligations in the middle. 
 I am a child of the eighties, so this story appealed to me greatly. My husband was highly entertained watching my face and listening to me reminisce about lots of stuff. I could hear the Pac Man arcade sounds in my head as I'm reading about Parzival playing the game, and of course there are all the music and movie and TV show references that I am well familiar with and love to pieces. There are such great references in this book! (And if you're not familiar with them, give them a try.) 
 The dystopia of this universe reminded me just a touch of an episode of the TV series seaQuest DSV in which the entire society played in a virtual reality game to the exclusion of going out to meet in person any longer. In this near future dystopia, everyone who can afford to get the gear to log in and has a quarter to open an account can play inside the OASIS, which started as an MMO and grew into the social medium of the future. An energy crisis causes massive worldwide shortages of fuel and jobs, and reality is so dim that everyone turns to the OASIS to escape it. The kids who can afford it learn in virtual schools. Businesses open virtual storefronts. OASIS currency is more valuable than physical currency. 
 And then the primary programmer of the OASIS, James Halliday, dies, and he leaves an "Easter egg" in the game, as well as clues to find it, and the first person who does find it inherits his full forture and the keys to the OASIS. The people who are serious about hunting for the egg are call "gunters." They spend every spare moment they have learning everything they can about James Halliday and his passions in the hope of finding the egg. The main character we follow through the story, Wade Watts aka Parzival, is a gunter. Six years after Halliday's death, still no one has found the first key from the first clue. 
 And then there is the big, multi-national conglomerate known as IOI which wants to take over the OASIS and commercialize it, much to the public's dismay, especially the gunters. IOI does everything they can to ruin the spirit of the egg hunt, and when they can't legally take over the company, they try to take over the egg hunt. The people they hire and play the game are known as "Sixers" (because they are all identified by their 6-digit IOI Employee ID numbers). They buy up special game artifacts, they try to buy information off gunters, and they pull some super dirty tricks when they feel threatened once some gunters beat them to the first key. 
 After the first key is discovered, the race is on for the gunters to try to keep ahead of IOI's Sixers. Though many gunters banded together into clans to egg hunt, Parzival and his friends prefer to work alone, but they find themselves having to sometimes work together to try to overcome the odds that IOI throws at them. 
 It is a really well thought out story. It's not as political as The Hunger Games trilogy turned out to be in the end. For me, it has more of a Rollerball feel to it because it's the individuals against the corporation in a future dystopia, but without the sports angle of Rollerball. 
 It's fairly big on eighties video game (and movie) culture, but you don't have to know the geek references to read it - they are explained however much is necessary to understand why it means something within the story. (There were a lot of geeky details about games in the eighties that I wasn't aware of, and all were sufficiently explained.) 
 If the rumors are true that they're making this into a movie, you can guarantee that I will be in line to see it. (Especially if Spielberg is attached!) This should turn into a fabulous movie, because it'll have to show visuals of the universe with a maybe 5-10 minute prologue instead of dumping all that backstory in narrative. 
 So, if you can get past the massive world-building and geek culture info dumps in the book, and you love the eighties, it's definitely worth reading. Would I read anything else by this author? I don't know. It depends on subject matter primarily, and I would probably read an excerpt to see if the info-dumping lessened. 
 (P.S. for anyone who read my in progress notes: I was wrong about the noise in the Basement prediction.)