Ernest Cline - Ready Player One

I should start out by saying I’m not much of a geek.  A lot of this book was lost on me in terms of the references to arcane 70s and 80s TV shows and videogames.  I wouldn’t say it diminished my enjoyment of it too much, either.  Perhaps I might have enjoyed it more if I did have the background knowledge of a bonafide geek born c. 1970 but there was still lots to like without such specialist knowledge.  This might seem a little strange at first.  The book is a geek classic and contains an absolutely huge amount of fairly specific information and discussion of videogames, movies and TV series that you’d think would be boring if you didn’t know what was being talked about.  That wasn’t the case for me and I was pleasantly surprised.  What was it that made this book enjoyable despite the vast majority of the subject matter being too esoteric for me as a reader?

The prose is nothing special and reminded me of something a bit like Dan Brown or Harry Potter.  There’s the occasional clanger, like “a lump of runny mashed potatoes” on p280, which sounds like a physical impossibility.  It’s not stellar stuff but it certainly is page turning and it definitely isn’t so bad that it inhibits your enjoyment of the narrative.  However, looking back on it after finishing, it isn’t really the narrative that makes this book fun either.  There’s a love story that isn’t very interesting but does involve some great snarky geek dialogue, which is a staple throughout the book.  There’s the fight against the evil and powerful corporate enemy IOI, which reminded me a lot of The Matrix and was fairly formulaic.  The narrative can be highly inventive in places and, like the prose, isn’t notably bad but nor is it very original or exceptional taken on its own.  On the whole, it focuses on fairly traditional and mundane themes, and contains these themes within the OASIS, a virtual, world-within-a-world simulation, and offers little comment or reflection on what’s happening outside it.  Occasionally, one of the protagonists will reflect on how lonely their physical lives have become but this is usually dismissed when the player remembers the significance of their actions and relationships within OASIS and their absolute infatuation with it.  

A good example of this primacy of OASIS over the real world is the incident when IOI try to blow up Wade.  In this episode, IOI believe Wade is inside his trailer, stacked on top of many others in a post-apocalyptic trailer park.  I was amazed that Wade doesn’t think to mention to the IOI executive threatening him that he isn’t there in the hope of saving some of the hundreds of lives that are later lost!   Granted, IOI might have blown up the stack anyway and  Wade certainly doesn’t have much time to think about what he’s going to do either.  However, he might have mentioned it on the way out to alleviate his conscience.  He barely reflects on the incident at all and certainly never questions his own actions and involvement, which seems extraordinary to me.  Maybe it is because he doesn’t really like anyone who lives in the stacks except for Mrs. Gilmore, for whom he does briefly mourn.  Or perhaps it’s because he wants IOI to think he is dead.  Either way he doesn’t seem to experience much regret over the death of his family and neighbours.  In fairness, the only experience we have of his family is them stealing from him and being horrible to him.  His relationship with Mrs Gilmore is better though and he genuinely doesn’t seem that perturbed by her death or his role in it.  Perhaps the simplest explanation is that the world he inhabits is dangerous and violent and the currency of life has become devalued in this nightmare. This all takes place around p145 and I think the incident does a good job of highlighting where the focus on the book lies; OASIS.  OASIS is preferable to the real world and, at least for the protagonists, has actually become the real world.  As such, the book concentrates on the 80s, pop culture, geek-fest egg hunt taking place in OASIS and the associated action-movie narrative rather than philosophizing about the condition of the humans on earth or the impact being involved in the death of 100s of them might have on a person!

The book is a high-tech, high-geek, adventure romp and not a meditation on society like 1984.  The author’s love for the main subject matter and his ability to deliver it to you with some of this enthusiasm still attached is what really make this book for me.  It’s as if the author has tried to imagine his perfect world and then described it for you.  It’s a world in which everyone loves what he loves, computer games and OASIS, and this has made his otherwise niche knowledge highly valued and essential to the survival of the ‘world’ as he knows it.  It’s like a geek dream world where, as opposed to being a marginalised sub-culture, all things cherished by geeks have become of central importance for society as a whole. The world he creates is fantastic too.  There are characters and buildings borrowed from all sorts of sci-fi movies and video games, both explicitly and implicitly, fantasy houses, vehicles, challenges and battles all play their part in this homage to the 1980s.  Some of the details are really excellent and the overall effect is captivating.  The orgy of geek sensibilities and relics engenders your enthusiasm as a reader precisely because it’s so enthusiastically expressed.  I felt like the author’s enjoyment and love of the subject had really been captured in his story.  You have to love the way he revels in his own geekiness and it is infectious, like listening to a child breathlessly recount some imagined adventure.  It’s enjoyable to see someone derive so much pleasure from self expression!  

Of course, I’m sure there are some problems with the rules and structure of the world he has created.  However, this is surely a problem for all but the very simplest of imagined worlds and I think it is reasonable to expect a reader to suspend their disbelief.  I sometimes struggle with this but this novel was so fast-paced there weren’t too many examples that really annoyed me.  The most gratuitous example was that it’s unrealistic that Wade has to get a job to pay his bills in the real world in Part 2.  If the online game was anywhere near as popular as it is depicted as being there would presumably be a way of converting some of his huge OASIS earnings into real world cash to pay his bills, which don’t seem hugely lavish.  There even seems to be one method described on p220!

On the whole, I enjoyed this book and thought it really stood out for the passion and enthusiasm the author conveys through it.  It’s not a deep, philosophically reflective piece and shouldn’t be read as such.  It’s a high octane, action packed love letter to 1980s culture written by a totally smitten, seriously dedicated and single-minded suitor!  I didn’t think the prose or the narrative were wonderful taken alone  but the overall effect was great and highly enjoyable.  Even for a n00b like me!

Mara Shalhoup - BMF: The Rise And Fall Of Big Meech And The Black Mafia Family

This book was well researched and had a lot of interesting information about Big Meech, his associates and the BMF.  A lot of this information appears to come from police records and other public sources, perhaps because interviews were hard to arrange or didn’t bear much fruit.  I suspect this was the case as the author does seem to have interviewed a lot of people, for example the family and friends of a man murdered in a club parking lot by a BMF associate, so it would be strange for her to simply not bother with the other more major players.  Nonetheless, this information is well marshalled and presented in a coherent and understandable manner, which is no mean feat given the intricacy and secrecy of the network in question.

What the book lacked in personal information, for example interviews with family members or childhood friends and individual psychological analysis, it partially made up with coverage of the practical and operational aspects of the business.  Deliveries, logistics, movement of cash, procurement of vehicles and property and ways to launder cash are all covered in detail.  The quantities involved are large with couriers regularly getting busted with 10 keys and major stash houses often containing millions of dollars and 100s of keys when busted.  As such, the crew must have been making serious money and I was amazed at how much of this could be used to buy cars and homes in the names of other people without much legitimate income of their own.  This highlighted how, before the inauguration of the wiretaps that would incriminate most of the top level BMF members, building a case against a drug dealer as flashy and brazen as Big Meech is a much more difficult task than one might imagine.  One has to suspect that, given the amounts of money involved, Meech and BMF were either paying off the police, using tactics of intimidation or both.

Another aspect I found interesting was the impermanence of drug money and the total lack of personal ownership that existed for the top management of BMF.  Cars, houses and jewelry had to be put in the names of other people and, in some cases, paid for by them via laundered money.  Given the huge quantities of money involved and the usual mentality of wanting to own things that’s attached to a desire for wealth, this attitude struck me as unusual.  Meech’s own attitude to money, that you can’t take it with you so you have to spend as much of it as possible, is in stark contrast to the hoarding tendencies that can be observed in others motivated by money.  Meech’s younger brother, Terry, appears to have been more concerned with owning assets, rather than spending wildly, but, counterintuitively, this would eventually land in him more trouble when the police were building a case against him whereas evidence of Meech’s assets was non-existent.  Conversely, Terry worried that Meech’s excessive lifestyle and high profile appearances in rap videos and magazines would bring unwanted attention to the organisation.  In the end, it was Terry talking on the phone and not Meech hiring out BMF billboards around Atlanta that proved to be far more damaging from a legal perspective.

The personality of Meech is intriguing but remains largely unexamined.  He is described as more fraternal and caring than his brother Terry, who is described as manipulative and paranoid.  Certainly Meech’s generosity towards his crew seems unrivalled but I was left wondering what his motivation was.  Clearly not simply money for the sake of accumulation.  For one thing, it struck me at several points throughout the book that Meech was fundamentally not that interested in hoarding or accumulating assets as he doesn’t seem to take much time or trouble to set up legitimate fronts through which to clean his money.  Rather, he prefers to concentrate on balling in the club, buying fleets of luxury cars and lots of jewelry.  This seems to be partially justified by the idea that these shows of flamboyance were the way to break into the rap game and start making legitimate money for BMF.  It seems like it is the excitement of the lifestyle and his love of ‘the game’ and its organisation that really drives him.  He love for cars and jewelry, shared by his brother, also seem to have been a serious motivating factor.  However, at some level he’s also clearly an egotist, for example the rap video appearances and legendary birthday parties, and that this too is more important than money.  It seems almost like a caricature of a black drug gang that BMF were trafficking drugs and money in private jets, limos and hummers; why on earth not use something a bit lower key!?!  It’s exactly this kind of lifestyle that is glamorized in lots of trap and dirty south rap and, for this reason, Big Meech is a huge cultural figure for me.  He was a man really living the alternative, black American dream and his lifestyle and image are ever present in late 90s and early 2000s southern gangster rap.  All the rappers want to be like Meech but, at the same time, Meech wants to be like the rappers.

Given this status as a man who was really living what most other people just rapped about it’s strange that his own lavishly funded efforts in the music industry didn’t yield more commercial success.  Undoubtedly a huge hip-hop head, Meech’s sole artist, Blue Da Vinci, never sold many records.  Meech does seem to play an important role in Young Jeezy’s stellar rise during this period but never signed him to his label.  As an aside, Jeezy gets some serious validation as a major cocaine trafficker by some of Meech’s associates in the book. At some points, it seems like Meech’s ultimate goal is recognition in the rap industry but, there again, given his huge success selling drugs why didn’t he make the transition earlier or in a more wholehearted way?  In the end I was left confused about what actually motivated Meech to build this empire; perhaps a combination of the excitement of the lifestyle, his love of spending money and an enjoyment of seeing his own ideas and principles acted out to produce greater and greater success.     

On a more negative note, the book's style was a little sensationalist and cliched for my tastes.  Clearly, this is a matter of taste rather than subjective judgement but I found the prose to be at its best when describing some of the complex transactions and networks involved in the operation of the business rather than when describing, presumably imagined, scenes of lavish opulence.

Finally, I did like this book as the subject matter is fascinating to me.  BMF were the epitome of a fast paced, lawless and intoxicating lifestyle that was synonymous with a style of Southern gangster rap that exploded into global significance around the same time the gang reached its zenith.  In some ways, BMF is deeply impressive; building an extensive and profitable network while managing to contain the infighting and conflict that usually ruin such organisation.  To be making millions of dollars a year from drugs and to be balling like Meech, to a level where he was a celebrity in his own right, is impressive for the sheer temerity of it.  Meech himself says that his most cherished memories come from his experiences with Young Jeezy while he was blowing up.  It is a fairytale lifestyle that most people can only dream about.  On the other hand, the obsession with cars and jewelry seem needlessly risky and a bit childish as an ultimate motivation.  Similarly, the lack of serious organisation of fronts to launder money diminishes my respect for BMF’s operations but, at the same time, shows a mindset that is engaging and appealing to me in its sheer difference from my own attitudes.  I suppose it is perhaps possible that more elaborate fronts did exist but have managed to be sheltered from investigation.  For me, this doesn’t really fit with the philosophy of BMF.  It is also sad, but probably inevitable, that a crew whose motto was ‘Death Before Dishonour’ mainly ended up ratting on each other to get plea bargains.  Lastly, selling coke and crack, and the murders and violence that go along with it, are a deeply sad and depressing industry that ruin lives and, because of this, there’s no way of seeing BMF as a group of principled, Robin Hood-esque outlaws.  Rather, they were a remarkably successful group of audacious, flashy, rap and money loving egotists whose attitudes and exploits provided the blueprint for a generation of rappers whose idolisation was, intriguingly, reciprocated by the gangsters themselves.