40 books fell prone to my reading sword this year, and the most
valiant beast, the best book I read in 2014, goes to Ready Player One by Ernest
Cline. There wasn’t even a dispute, the race was clear-cut. RP1 was amazing.
It’s the story of a massive treasure hunt that captivates the
entire world and causes a resurgence of the pop culture and video games found
in the 1980s. People wear bell-bottoms again, coin-operated arcade games are
all the craze, and the main character Parzival has mastered them all. He’s
watched every movie and TV show the 80s ever produced. He knows the lyrics to
every song. He studies and studies again everything 80s. All of this just to
have a chance at finding the first clue in the treasure hunt where the winner
will inherit a vast fortune and gain ownership to the Oasis, a massively
multiplayer online second life computer game that the world now lives within.
Ready Player One appealed to all of my gamer loves and ticks and
even though I didn’t grow up in the 80s, reading about the culture and interests
spawned respect for everything the author cared about and what he obviously
wanted his readers to reminisce upon and re-live. In some ways I think I liked
it more because everything was new, but I would love to read it for the first
time again only as myself 10 years older and a boy that grew up in the 80s just
to see and feel the nostalgia first hand. It was an excellent, fast, fun read –
hands down the best book I read this year.
2014 also marks the momentous event of a series of books rising to
the top to be crowned my Favorite Series of All Time. This title was previously
held by The Sword of Truth books by Terry Goodkind. Since high school I’ve read
them three times. I even have a tattoo of the sword on my calf, but there’s a
new champ – The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher.
With 15 books competed and another 8 planned, this series is
enormous, and I can’t wait to read every one of them. Harry Dresden is the only
wizard in the yellow pages. He’s a consultant for the Chicago Police Department
and a real practitioner of magic. These books are a rip roaring detective
adventure through the seedy underbelly of Chicago and the magical realms found
in all myth and fantasy. There are vampires, werewolves, faeries, thugs with
guns, demons, angels, zombies, ghosts, Santa… everything fantasy you can ever
think of wrapped up neatly in truly believable novels. They flow from one to
the other. The characters and side characters grow and evolve as the story
progresses. They gain new powers and trinkets and lose them three books later,
but grow out of the whole experience. This series is so good that with all the
books on my current need to read list, and my voracious want to consume all
literature, I just picked up book one again to start them anew.
It’s been a great year and I’m excited to compile next year’s
list.
