BOOK COLLECTOR

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline Crown Publishers, 374 pages, $24. 2012 Prometheus Award Nerdgasm: 80s pop-culture, a VR MMORPG Easter Egg, retro-VGs, & one hell of a BIG BOSS!  Ernest Cline’s debut novel, Ready Player One , already has a reputation that precedes itself. Published only three years ago, this genre-expanding dystopian YA adventure-quest bestseller (that’s not a mouthful) has already climbed the cult-status pantheon. Just flip to his dust-jacket bio and you’ll see Cline posing in front of a DeLorean --a vehicle that makes its fair share of appearances in the novel--along with the claim that “his primary occupation [in spite of everything else] has always been geeking out”. If Ready Player One is any gauge for Cline’s ability to “geek out”, then he’s written an exemplary CV.  Jump to a resource depleted America circa 2044, where the Global Energy Crisis has nearly wiped out suburbia. As a result, urban populations have become swollen with th...

The Good Lord Bird by James McBride, Riverhead, 417 pages, $27.95 2013 National Book Award Winner The Omen of The Good Lord Bird: American Slavery and the Story of John Brown as Tragicomedy Nearly two decades since the publication of his sensational memoir, The Color of Water, James McBride has spun another fantastic and comedic yarn--this time of John Brown’s rebellion in The Good Lord Bird .  Winner of the 2013 National Book Award for Fiction, McBride frames his novel as a recovered slave narrative recounted by Henry ‘the Onion’ Shackleford and ghost-written by an “amateur historian” of dubious reputation. This fiction, the prologue informs readers, is the product of an unverified document, written by a person of uncertain character, recounted from the memory of a another man said to be a centenarian that nobody remembers, about an event that lacks historical eyewitness testimony. So, while, incredulous readers won't be fooled by the creative historic framing of this ...