This week, an old girlfriend, who also graduated from Collinsville High School, pointed me a new book and I thought I’d share it with you.

Recently published by Crown Publishing on August 16, Ready Player One by author Ernest Cline, is a book sure to resonate with everyone who lived through the 1980s.

What’s not to like in a plot that employs the references of the past with some science fiction of the near future, yet resonates to our present day condition. Set in 2044, the book is a dystopian look at the not-so-distant future where citizens flee a grim reality by logging in to the OASIS, an virtual-reality game that’s become something more akin to Second Life.

This is the first novel for the Ohio born writer. Cline, a self-proclaimed geek in his late-30s who proudly owns his own Delorean DMC-12, also wrote the screenplay for the movie Fanboys. The movie about Star Wars fanatics set in 1998 centers around the plot of a group of high school friends who hatch a plan to try to infiltrate George Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch and steal a rough cut of the first film in the newest Star Wars trilogy.

Here’s a playlist that Cline created using songs referenced in the book. I just purchased the book so I have yet to read it so we’ll see if the book resonates with me as much as Douglas Coupland’s Generation X or Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity did. If the reviews and the synopsis are any indication I’m sure that many people from our generation, including myself, will love it.

Believe me – this book will be more fun than anything you had to read during high school. However, this book seems to have movie written all over it. In fact the film rights were already bought by Warner Bros. last year, but why wait? The book is always better.

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline–Book Trailer