#16 in Dystopian
Ready Player One
- 462
- Pages
- about 8 h
- Reading time
- NYT bestseller · 24 weeks on the list, peaked at #1
- Prometheus Award
- Alex Award
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Our view
This treasure hunt through a virtual world built out of 1980s games, films and music delights most when those references are your own. The setting is inventive and the chase moves briskly. Some find the hero its weak point: Wade has little personality beyond his gaming skill, finds an answer to every obstacle, and is admired by everyone around him anyway. Great fun for the nostalgic, thinner for everyone else.
Worth knowing Written for readers who grew up in the 1980s: the puzzles hinge on the games, films and music of that decade, so the more you recognise, the more you will get out of it. It won the Alex Award, which American librarians give to adult books with teen appeal. Steven Spielberg’s 2018 film replaces most of the book’s challenges with new ones, and the 2020 sequel, Ready Player Two, was received far less warmly.
The view of the BookRank editors, written from readers’ ratings and comments. It does not affect the score or the book’s place in a ranking.
About the book
Ready Player One is a 2011 science fiction novel, and the debut novel of American author Ernest Cline. The story, set in a dystopia in 2045, follows protagonist Wade Watts on his search for an Easter egg in a worldwide virtual reality game, the discovery of which would lead him to inherit the game creator's fortune and the game itself. Cline sold the rights to publish the novel in June 2010, in a bidding war to the Crown Publishing Group. The book was published on August 16, 2011. An audiobook narrated by Wil Wheaton was released the same day.Ch. 20 In 2012, the book received an Alex Award from the Young Adult Library Services Association division of the American Library Association and won the 2011 Prometheus Award.
Where the score comes from
The sources average 8.1 across 5,689 ratings. With that many, the reader vote carries 97% of the weight and the score stays at 8.1 — the Dystopian average of 7.7 barely moves it.
| Source | Average | Ratings | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open Library | 8.0 | 315 | 6% |
| Google Books | 9.0 | 31 | 1% |
| Hardcover | 8.1 | 5.3K | 94% |
Frequently asked
How long is Ready Player One?
It has 462 pages — longer than 55% of the ranked books in Dystopian.
In this book
Themes this book shares with others — each leads to the best books on it.
If you liked this
Same shelf — Dystopian — with scores between 7.9 and 8.3, closest to this book.
