Welcome to the Maribyrnong Library Book Club

Love to read? Love sharing your ideas about books and writing? Then you've come to the right place.

This blog is an extension of our book groups which we welcome you to attend on the first Tuesday of each month.

Contact Maureen on 9688 0290 for more information.

Thursday, August 30, 2012

Ready Player One – Ernest Cline

In a near future dystopia, an energy crisis has reduced the quality of living to the point where many people spend a great deal of their time in a simulated virtual reality world named OASIS.  OASIS was designed and owned primarily by James Halliday, now the richest man in the world, but with no heirs upon his death, Halliday instead leaves a public video will in which he states that the first person to find 3 keys that unlock 3 hidden gates within OASIS will inherit his fortune.  However, Halliday was obsessed with the 80’s and the quests to find the keys reference obscure 80's pop culture prompting a worldwide resurgence of 80’s fashion, music and movies as people and corporations around the world attempt to solve the riddles Halliday left behind.

3 years later, after all but the most die-hard contestants have written Halliday’s will off as a joke, Wade Owen Watts, or “Parzival”, discovers the first key, and suddenly the competition is on in earnest.

I love Ready Player One.  It’s the best book I’ve read this year, but reviewing it is more difficult for me than reading it, because I know that I’m very much the target audience.  Firstly, the book is very well written, characters are well drawn and the threat well established which gives the quest narrative weight.  And Ernest Cline knows his stuff.  Not just the 80’s pop culture references, but he understands the online world and the people who populate it.  He understands game systems and the games industry.  Recently we’ve seen a few attempts by other authors to write books that tap into this market, but this is the first one I’ve read that actually works as an engaging story.

Ten months after Ready Player One was released, Cline revealed that the book itself contains the first of a series of puzzles for readers.  The competition’s prize will be a fully kitted out DeLorean, if you don’t know what a DeLorean is, this might not be the novel for you.  If you do, I urge you to read this book.

The opinions posted here are my own and not those of Maribyrnong City Council.

Michael Lay

Friday, August 24, 2012

The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood

The Handmaid’s Tale tells the story of Offred, one of the few fertile women left in the Republic of Gilead, a totalitarian, patriarchal theocracy that overthrew the old United States of America by assassinating most of congress and blaming it on Islamic extremists.  Women have lost almost all their rights under the new regime and Offred’s only choice for her future is a slow death working in irradiated lands, suicide, or prove she is fertile by living as a surrogate mother for the wife of one of the powerful new commanders.

I read The Handmaid’s Tale many years ago as one of my VCE Year 12 texts and it’s easy to see why it was chosen.  Many different themes are woven into the story.  Perhaps the one that has stuck with me most over the intervening years is the idea that perhaps our relatively recent victories for race and sex equality and religious freedom aren’t as permanent as we’d like to think.  That political apathy might allow fanatics of one persuasion or another a way to regress our social development in some small or large way.

The other idea that really stuck with me was that the women in the dystopian future of The Handmaid’s Tale essentially have a counterpart in today’s society.  The most direct comparison would be with women living in nations under Islamic rule, but even within the more western religions, the role of women is still largely pushed as being subservient to men.   The theocracy depicted in The Handmaid’s Tale is a fundamentalist Christian one.  Offred’s ritualized surrogate mother role is taken from the biblical story of Rachel and Leah.  We enjoy a very liberal existence in Australia, but this book made me realize that not only are there always going to be individuals who view women as inherently inferior to men, but there are actually nations where the idea is law.

The opinions posted here are my own and not those of Maribyrnong City Council.

Michael Lay

Thursday, August 2, 2012

Diving the Wreck – Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Kristine Rusch  has written romance, sci-fi, mystery and crime novels, but reading Diving the Wreck you’d never know, it’s a straight up sci-fi novel and it’s done very well.

Our protagonist is Boss, a loner spaceship captain who dives wrecked spaceships she finds in the depths of space.  These wrecks are here livelihood, as she can bring tourists on dives of wrecks that she deems safe enough, but she’s also a historian, who dives wrecks for the love of the history associated with them.

Then she finds an derelict ship, incredibly old and originating from Earth, but in a sector of space it should never have been able to reach.  The ship is a mystery that could hold incredible riches, incredible danger, or both.

Diving the Wreck reads like a small story in a large universe.  Rusch concentrates on the details of Boss’s life and story.  She is a believable and compelling character and the mystery of the ship and how Boss decides to deal with it made this a very quick and easy book to read.

Michael L.