Oh!

Oh! Oh yes. Connor. Connor, are you there?

I am there, Mike. Hello. Can you hear me? I can. Welcome, everybody. This is

372 pages that will never get back. We are doing a podcast book club of a book that we're pretty sure we're going to hate. That book is Ready Player 1 by Ernest Klein, and this is our first real episode. We are diving in. They had their assignment and hopefully they read it. Joining me as always, well, always for the second time is Michael J. Nelson. Mike, how you doing? I'm good. Yeah, and that does, that qualifies as always. You're on the right track. Always. It's been a 100% track. 100%. Yeah. I'm doing good. How are you? I think we talked in the last time. We did not know it was a cliffhanger as to what we would think of this book. what are your initial thoughts Connor before we dive into the meat of it sure sure we'll get to

we'll get to what we would think of this book. What are your initial thoughts, Connor, before we dive

into the meat of it? Sure, sure. We'll get to why we think these. But my initial thoughts were,

you know, I read the introduction, which sort of sets up the treasure hunt. But I was reading the

first two chapters and I was like, I hope that we have enough to work with here because

I was sort of intrigued by the, by the way he sets up the treasure hunt. And I was hoping that

the impression I had of it sort of being more littered with with throwaway pop culture

references and stuff was going to come into play. And then very quickly, it became apparent that we had made the right decision.

There's a scene where everything sort of fell into place.

And I was like, we're going to have a lot of fun with this.

Yeah, there were unexpected delights.

This is a little bit like, I don't, you know, I don't want to go as far as to say like like, the roadhouse of a bad book. But, you know, the, just like almost every sentence. As, as I was doing the notes for it, I really had to restrain myself. Like, I'm a pretty fast typist. So, like, recopying paragraphs of him was, you know, I had to stop my own hand. Like, dear God, did you read this paragraph? Exactly. At some point it became, there was going to be a lot of stuff to discuss and I don't know how long this is going to take us to get through the first only three chapters. So I sort of just had to highlight the highlights of my highlights in order to sort of narrow it down. Yeah, and we'll get to that in a minute,

but I think it's important for people. I brought this up with you, Connor. You agreed this is a good

idea. We sort of touched on it a little bit in the, in episode zero or whatever we're calling that,

the preview to it of, you know, what have we read? But we really didn't get into what do we like.

And so I think it's, you know,

you know how you read a critic for a number of years or maybe just a, you know, you read a couple of

reviews of a critic and you, you don't get his overall take on the world. You only get his,

his, you know, close up view of the movies or whatever or the books that you're,

...