This story starts a long time ago, when I read the first book (in my reading record), where everyone died at the end. Which was it? Should I tell? Well, since I am in doubt, I won't, unless you guys ask. Back then I was fascinated and as it often happens when someone is fascinated and wants to keep it so forever it turned into a bit of obsession, so when people were sharing their book/movie/play/whatever experience I developed the habit to ask if everyone died at the end, because this is so cool, man, really! And for my utter surprise most of them replied with a plain, short 'no' instead of the classic 'well, watch it/ read it and you will find out', which I would have expected.
Then, as some experts of human happiness claim, emitting a frequency always gets the same frequency back to you, (which I appreciate would sound foreign to many of you and you will probably crook your face, so hereby I explain that what they mean is that when someone for example whines that s/he is in lack of money, s/he will be in lack of money continuously, because this is the creating message that person sends out to the Universe and it reflects it back to the person) I stumbled upon a few others pieces of fiction where all the crew didn't die but they were surely trying hard throughout the story and the classics about the boys on the island, where I intentionally stopped reading a few pages before the end, or a (master-)piece where the 1st person story-teller died in the second chapter already.
This said, it comes as no surprise, that when I watched 'Ready Player One', I was thrilled to find out that everyone died in the middle of the movie. And, of course, when afterwards I glanced the book in a huge multi-purpose grocery shop, at the side of a shelf with the size of a truck with 'Peppa Pig' books, I immediately put it in my cart.
I started reading it in the plane I caught later that day and it was in a way funny to find out that it is the same and yet not the same as the movie. The characters names were the same, their appearance wasn't. It certainly came as a shock that the main character looks like the kids from South Park in the episode with World of Warcraft where they were playing it around the clock. Also the contest to finding the keys was structured in another way, with different riddles and since at that point of time I thought I liked riddles, I was fairly entertained throughout the first as-many-as-you-can-read-on-a-plane pages.
When I got off the plane, I was in the midst of chapter 6, with the mention of 'the recommended gunter's reading list' which started with Douglas Adams and Kurt Vonnegut. And getting home I actually prioritised double checking if I still roll on the floor laughing at 'Mostly Harmless' and mostly I did. Then I got nostalgic to the old ice-9 fellow as well and I started 'Fates Worse than Death'. Logically the chain of analogy and chaos expanded and formed fractals in my reading priority and it wasn't until the little book on the shelf with a movie poster on the front cover said 'Khm, I am still here you know' that I picked it back up. 'Fine, jump in my bag', I answered cheerfully and we were back on. By the way, 'little' here is not entirely correct, as this book contains a remarkable amount of words in tiny font and with stingy page margin, so depending on publisher it could have been up to 800 pages. But those were not the words I needed, in the world I didn't quite entirely understood the need to know. Luckily I watched the movie first, so I had a notion of what the Oasis looked like. Otherwise I would have probably imagined it as the illustrations in 'The Little Prince'. Really, travelling between planets is not my department, neither are the 'mine is bigger than yours'-attitude girls, so naturally I humbly started clipping text off my visual field and thus shortening the content of the book and my way to the 'everyone dies in the middle'-scene. Here I must admit that I must have unconciously taken note of many of my friends' remarks that skipping text is generally a bad habit, because I was doing it within the page. Until the moment I stopped liking riddles. Maybe forever. Too early to tell. Because of pizzerias and replicas of things and something that looked suspicious at the position it was, although I didn't find anything suspicious about that.
So I flipped and flipped and there was the dancing scene, which I vastly enjoyed in the movie and was not at all my piece of cake in the book.
I continued like this skimming warily through the pages, cautious not to stop liking reading as well. Until the moment I just put a nail in the book's body randomly forward of reading point. And turned a block of pages.
The first thing I read afterwards was 'And then we all died'. Followed by a lovely scene of what exactly it meant in the virtual reality, how was it as an experience, and how Parzival ended up having an extra life. And I happily smiled, as I stressed and underlined to my unconscious, finger-pointing self, that in every book there is something that can make me a better person and I always ought to trust that a book knows how to take care of me. Instead of sticking to what is assumed to be 'good habits'.
What this book made me better with, apart from the things already mentioned, is the information that in Latin 'school' and 'game' is exactly the same word. 'Ludus' for the curious ones, who don't know it already. You only learn if you play, so sweet and simple, I love it.