Ready Player One: Gaming, Gender, and Identity

I need to talk about Ready Player One. I’ve needed to talk about it for weeks, nay, months. I’ve started and deleted a few posts because I am so frustrated with this book that I can’t get my thoughts together. So, I’m just going to jump in and I hope you’ll bare with me.

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline is one of the novels that my partner put on my sci-fi/fantasy reading list. It is a more recent novel, published in 2011 that captures nostalgia for 70’s and 80’s pop-culture, technology, and gaming. It also has a problem with gender and identity. 

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Blind Spots: Reading Outside My Comfort Zones

This summer I found myself in a researching, reading, and writing haze. Caught behind stacks of books that threatened to bury me alive and the continued soft glow of a computer screen on my pale skin instead of warm summer sun, I began to think about what I might do with my time once this MRP business was over with. Most students go through this phase; we dream of other activities or careers as a means to escape the low points of academic solitude. I have known some people to book flights to far away locals in an attempt to out run the work load. There is something freeing about the idea of physically leaving behind all your books and edited pieces of paper. But, after about ten minutes of glancing at the price of European flights, I clicked those browser windows shut and took another route.

Review: Picture Perfect

For Lauren Tate, a high-powered TV producer, sex, lies, and scandal make for a great movie-of-the-week, but when she becomes the target of a smear campaign, even the most salacious of Hollywood’s tales can’t compare to her real life drama. With her soon-to-be-ex-husband leading the effort to sully her reputation, and her former assistant threatening to snatch her hard-earned position at Timeless Television out of her hands, Lauren’s perfectly planned life quickly begins to unravel at the seams. 

Clawing her way back to the top of the TV food chain is no easy task, especially in an industry where backstabbing is a sport and gossip is a full time business. But Lauren learns just how cut throat showbiz can truly be when the hottest scandal in Tinsel Town turns deadly and the Hollywood hunk who’s stolen her heart is missing in action. Can she salvage her career, her reputation, and her love life? Or will Hollywood be the death of her?

Review: Recession Proof

Sometimes going after what you want is the hardest thing you will ever do…

Meet Helen. Smart, successful and obliviously trapped. For the past six years, Helen has given her life and her heart to her cushy corporate finance job and to Mark without question. However as the Recession sweeps the Nation, she is one of many left unemployed and with the burning question of what does she really want in life.

Recession Proof is a debut novel for anyone that has settled in their career and relationship but has discovered that what really matters in life is living it.

Review: Blank Slate Kate

Waking up with a strange man is scary. Realizing you lost fifteen years of your life overnight? That’s terrifying. With her memories from seventeen to thirty-two gone, Kate has no idea who she is and where she belongs. As she begins to fall for the man who found her, she wonders if she forgot those years for a reason. Should she keep trying to retrieve her original self, or start a new life? (Heather Wardell)

I have to admit that it has been a couple of months since reading Blank Slate Kate. But now that life is evening out a little bit, here is my review. This is one of two Wardell novels that I devoured over my first term break, staying up late into the night because I could not put it down! Wardell included the first chapter of Kate at the end of Live Out Loud (review to come) and I was hooked.