The book has captured me with one sentence. Not in a good way, not in a bad way, but in a way that I want to see if the sentence becomes anything of meaning bad enough to skim through the rest of the book. I'll get to that later.

I picked it up two days ago in an airport for a 12 hour trip and I'm to the third gate. I like what's happening the same way I like 90's TV shows - it follows a set formula well enough that I my focus can drift in and out but I never lose my place. It's great for a busy thoroughfare where the guy next to me has angry birds on full volume and a new crowd fills the halls every 15 minutes.

I get what you're saying and if I was old enough in the 80's to appreciate these references, they might get under my skin too. But I wasn't and so I have enough distance from them to see them a little differently - nerd name dropping. The author never had tea with Ayatollah Khomeini or fought bulls with Ernest Hemingway, but he knows the color of a house on an old atari game and, by god, that should count for something.

There were two things about this book that destroyed any chance of it being taken seriously for me, both on the front cover. The first was a blurb stating this was "Harry Potter for Grown-ups". Anything stating it's for grown ups, isn't. That's just not the way the world worked. So I picked it up for what it was - a young adult novel for young adults pining for a time they only have fond nostalgia for.

The second came a bit later, when the hero got his in game transport - a modified delorean. On the front cover, the author leans against the same car. If I had any doubt before, I don't now - this is the high school power fantasy of a nerd growing up in the 80's. Where everything he liked is somehow useful to the adult world. I can identify with that longing, but hope to never embody it, so while I read this romp a large part of me enjoys it, but some more serious part of me sees it for the cautionary tale that it is.

That alone isn't enough to stick with it, which brings me back to that one sentence that captured me. It's when the other creator of OASIS talks about how the world's problems are caused by everyone dropping out of reality and into hyperreality. How the main character can see that the world he lives in is just a very expensive masturbatory tool. How there's some kind of desire for social change.

I'm hoping that by the end of this little novel, the author will be able to make some kind of minute commentary, plant some basic seed of knowledge into the minds of the millions of people who will read this about how amazing digital worlds can be for the individual and how detrimental they can be the group. How they're little more thank drugs of light and sound.

So yeah, it's not as fun as Scott Pilgrim, not as deep as Super Sad True Love Story, but it's good enough to pass the time and I'm hoping against hope that it can raise at least one obscure idea to greater attention.