Remember the woman who foolishly tweeted about gettings AIDs on her trip to Africa? She claimed to be sarcastic and making fun of racists. Tone is hard to read in text. Humor is hard to read in strangers. The internet rallied against her. She lost her job. She lost control of her image. Did she behave foolishly? Absolutely. Was the response appropriate? TBD.
The Answers centers around a famous director stuck working on the same passion project. He believes that he needs to be loved in order to find the motivation to finish his new film. With his mountains of money and influence, he creates a project to see if he can outsource all the different “roles” a romantic partner would play to different women.
Crazy Rich Asians is a treat. It may sound like a drugstore buy, yet it has a tremendous amount of depth. The story revolves around Rachel and Nick, a couple living in America who are going to Singapore together for Nick’s best friend’s wedding. To Rachel’s surprise, her humble professor boyfriend is actually part of the Asian elite and his best friend is the biggest celeb of the region.
What’s it about?
Ready Player One is set in the future (2044-2045) where the world is in extreme poverty, technology has advanced tremendously, and most humans don’t interact face to face. Our narrator, Wade Watts, spends most of his time inside a simulation called the OASIS. He’s not the only one. Most of the world interacts through the OASIS, goes to school, runs a business, and more. A contest is held to find easter eggs within the OASIS and win the fortune of a tech mogul who helped create it. It’s not all fun and games, and some unsavory characters come into the fold.
Through our narrator, Elena (nicknamed Lenu), we get to know her and her frenemy Raffaela (nicknamed Lila and Lina). We watch as both girls grow up in 1950s Naples. In a poor rough neighborhood, scandals, murders, and violent depression are common. Throughout the four-book-series, we will follow their lives up until their middle age. It’s a bildungsroman (coming of age story) in every sense.