Ready Player One Review

I had meant to write a longer review of both the book and the movie but ran out of time. I enjoyed the book but thought it had a couple too many deus ex machina's. The opening scene of the movie was very well done and captured the excitement and novelty of the book's central idea, which was: How great would it be to play all your old 80s favorites -- games and music and TV and movies -- in virtual reality? The movie also brought to vivid life my favorite scene from the book, the only one written well, the "dance" between Parzival and Art3mis. The big screen version was close to how I imagined it in my head. The movie's closing scene was a lame failure in comparison to the opener, although it would have been hard to top the latter. I suppose the scene was effective for showing how un-sexy and un-exciting real life is (compared to the OASIS), even if it's supposed to be a chase scene.

The book has probably one of the best summations of the current American atheist worldview:


"Here's the deal, Wade. You're something called a 'human being.' That's a really smart kind of animal. Like every other animal on this planet, we're descended from a single-celled organism that lived millions of years ago. This happened by a process called evolution, and you'll learn more about it later. But trust me, that's really how we all got here. There's proof of it everywhere, buried in the rocks. That story you heard? About how we were all created by a super-powerful dude named God who lives up in the sky? Total bullshit. The whole God thing is actually an ancient fairy tale that people have been telling one another for thousands of years. We made it all up. Like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.

"Oh, and by the way ... there's no Santa Claus or Easter Bunny. Also bullshit. Sorry, kid. Deal with it.

"You're probably wondering what happened before you got here. An awful lot of stuff, actually. Once we evolved into humans, things got pretty interesting. We figured out how to grow food and domesticate animals so we didn't have to spend all our time hunting. Our tribes got much bigger, and we spread across the entire planet like an unstoppable virus. Then, after fighting a bunch of wars with each other over land, resources, and our made-up gods, we eventually got all of our tribes organized into a 'global civilization.' But, honestly, it wasn't all that organized, or civilized, and we continued to fight a lot of wars with each other. But we also figured out how to do science, which helped us develop technology. For a bunch of hairless apes, we've actually managed to invent some pretty incredible things. Computers. Medicine. Lasers. Microwave ovens. Artificial hearts. Atomic bombs. We even sent a few guys to the moon and brought them back. We also created a global communications network that lets us all talk to each other, all around the world, all the time. Pretty impressive, right?

"But that's where the bad news comes in. Our global civilization came at a huge cost. We needed a whole bunch of energy to build it, and we got that energy by burning fossil fuels, which came from dead plants and animals buried deep in the ground. We used up most of this fuel before you got here, and now it's pretty much all gone. This means that we no longer have enough energy to keep our civilization running like it was before. So we've had to cut back. Big-time. We call this the Global Energy Crisis, and it's been going on for a while now.

"Also, it turns out that burning all those fossil fuels had some nasty side effects, like raising the temperature of our planet and screwing up the environment. So now the polar ice caps are melting, sea levels are rising, and the weather is all messed up. Plants and animals are dying off in record numbers, and lots of people are starving and homeless. And we're still fighting wars with each other, mostly over the few resources we have left.

"Basically, kid, what this all means is that life is a lot tougher than it used to be, in the Good Old Days, back before you were born. Things used to be awesome, but now they're kind of terrifying. To be honest, the future doesn't look too bright. You were born at a pretty crappy time in history. And it looks like things are only gonna get worse from here on out. Human civilization is in 'decline.' Some people even say it's 'collapsing.'

"You're probably wondering what's going to happen to you. That's easy. The same thing is going to happen to you that has happened to every other human being who has ever lived. You're going to die. We all die. That's just how it is.

"What happens when you die? Well, we're not completely sure. But the evidence seems to suggest that nothing happens. You're just dead, your brain stops working, and then you're not around to ask annoying questions anymore. Those stories you heard? About going to a wonderful place called 'heaven' where there is no more pain or death and you live forever in a state of perpetual happiness? Also total bullshit. Just like all that God stuff. There's no evidence of a heaven and there never was. We made that up too. Wishful thinking. So now you have to live the rest of your life knowing you're going to die someday and disappear forever.

"Sorry."

Beach Shots

 

 

 

 

 

The Narnia Lamppost!

Neighborhood Egg Hunt

Our neighborhood had the annual egg hunt on Holy Saturday at "Mormon Park" up the street from us.  It's a great time.

 

 

The Caspian Corrections

I'm still reading The Chronicles of Narnia to the girls.  We're on Prince Caspian, which is 4th in the currently published series (but was second when I read them as a kid, the original order).  It's taking us a bit longer on this one but we're almost finished.  JoJo's favorite character is still Aslan, while MM like to play as Susan and Lucy.

It was a nice coincidence that Caspian appears in the latest novel I read, The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen.  I had really enjoyed his book Freedom and needed a read for the beach, so I downloaded it into the Kindle app on our iPad.  That was a first and I have to admit, I enjoyed reading that way.  Easier to transport and put away, and no need to store something after finishing it - although it does use a lot of the battery.  At any rate, I enjoyed the stories of the children in The Corrections, but the parents (Alfred & Enid) got a little annoying after a while.  The climax in the last ten pages was quite satisfying.  I appreciate that Franzen doesn't over-do it on the gay characters, and all the sex is 'traditionally' hetero.  The married characters' marriages were ... less than ideal, and instructive & enlightening to me.  And another reason the end was so great, explaining the title (basically Enid hounded Alfred their whole lives together).

Reading Lewis

One of the first things I thought about after hearing I would be a father was how much fun it would be to read The Chronicles of Narnia to my kids.  MM and JoJo are probably a tad young, but I couldn't wait any longer and we recently broke into The Magician's Nephew.  (My series has it first even though that wasn't the original order.)  MM did a pretty good job keeping up with the plot and characters.  JoJo seemed very impressed by Queen Jadis picking up Diggory and Polly by their hair; she re-enacted that part several times.  The girls referred to the book by the kids' names instead of its real title and we worked through it one chapter a night.  Reading it to them was everything I thought it would be.

Somewhat coincidentally, I simultaneously read Lewis's The Screwtape Letters as part of a class at my church, taught by our pastor, Fr. John.  I had never given much thought to demons and their methods of tempting before.  I always believed in Satan and devils but never put my intellect to them.  The class was great and I learned much about myself and Christianity.  In some ways ignorance was bliss, but I'm the better for it.  The description of Wormwood losing "The Patient" to Heaven is such a beautiful rendering of what leaving this life for the next might be like that you don't at all feel sad that he was killed in an air raid and separated from his sweet, Christian girlfriend.  That part made me long for death.

Instructive

I was reading this book, New Deal or Raw Deal, which shows how FDR's economic legacy has greatly damaged the US over the long term, and saw this quote from Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morganthau in 1939:

"We have tried spending money.  We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work.  And I have just one interest, and if I am wrong ... somebody else can have my job.  I want to see this country prosperous.  I want to see people get a job.  I want to see people get enough to eat.  We have never made good on our promises. ... I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started. ... And an enormous debt to boot."

Quite instructive for our own times.  As the book makes clear, it was only WW2 that brought us out of the Depression.  All of FDR's alphabet soup gov't programs and huge spending prolonged the bad economy, despite what's taught in the history books.  We are heading down the same road now, but hopefully not the eight years part.

JoJo Cliffy Sleep

                        

She sure loves her Clifford books.  Lately she's taken to sleeping on the floor, which is fine.  How she ended up in the bathroom for one nap was a mystery to Bobbins.

Fathers Day Gifts

These two books were my Fathers Day gifts.  I've enjoyed Andy McCarthy's columns on NRO, and the first book is his latest, entitled The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America. (I think Bobbins wants to read some of this herself...).  The second is called Next, by James Hynes.  I read a review of it in the newspaper a while back and it sounded interesting.  Would be the perfect beach read except we're not going to the beach this summer.  Maybe for up at the cabin.  Thanks Bobbins and MM!

New Books

The amazing bobbin (S) tracked down some of the old Nancy Drew books for only 67cents each.  We've seen these in antique stores for up to $5 each.  I loved the Hardy Boys books when I was kid, and hopefully our girls will get into these.