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What Members Thought
This book suffered for me due to too much hype.
Not just hype from the kind of white male geeks that you would expect to strongly identify with such a novel, but also from girls and women who seemed to like it in spite of being mostly left out of its narrative.
So I was disappointed that it read pretty much just like a white geek boy fantasy, and that its attempts at being subversive with its geek lore and it's "rise of the nerds" themes really fell short when everything referenced is actually pre ...more
Not just hype from the kind of white male geeks that you would expect to strongly identify with such a novel, but also from girls and women who seemed to like it in spite of being mostly left out of its narrative.
So I was disappointed that it read pretty much just like a white geek boy fantasy, and that its attempts at being subversive with its geek lore and it's "rise of the nerds" themes really fell short when everything referenced is actually pre ...more
This book started slow for me, but by the last third it became compulsively readable. It's a book I likely never would have picked up on my own, but Jenny B's review made me want to check it out. Part of what I liked is that it's not the type of book I would've normally picked. That said, I think a lot of the videogame references were lost on me because I'm not someone as knowledgeable about video games. I think my biggest criticism of the book is the same criticism I had about the Martian: that
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I really liked this book!!! It was all about a world I'm not very knowledgable in (computer games) but it read more like an adventure and a mystery and that I can get behind. I actually think it would play really well as a YA book, but I enjoyed it as an adult too. The characters are mostly high schoolers, they're fun characters and well rounded, you see most of them as avatars throughout the book, but not in an unaccessible way. There are also tons of 80s references which I loved reading about,
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This book pretty much rocked. Ernest Cline's heavy-handedness in the first 100 pages outlining a personal belief system kept it from a 5-star rating.
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Nov 14, 2011
Sophie
marked it as to-read
Aug 18, 2012
Laura
added it
Dec 07, 2012
Shannon
marked it as to-read
Jan 22, 2013
Heather
added it
Mar 17, 2015
Becki
marked it as to-read
