TL;DR: Worth your commute. Actually, worth about 8 commutes - this thing is 15+ hours and I didn't want it to end.
Okay, so I'm going to admit something embarrassing. I put off listening to Ready Player One for years because I thought it would be too on-the-nose. Like, I already live in tech, I already grew up on 80s references through my parents' VHS collection, I already spend way too much time thinking about virtual worlds. Did I really need a book that was basically a love letter to all of that?
Turns out: yes. Yes I did.
Wil Wheaton Was Born For This
Look, I finished this during a particularly brutal two weeks where my team was debugging a cascading failure in our distributed cache system. I'm talking 6AM trains, 9PM trains, and one memorable night where I fell asleep on BART and ended up in Richmond. Through all of it, Wil Wheaton's voice was the one consistent thing keeping me sane.
Here's the thing about Wheaton narrating this book - it's basically cheating. The guy is 80s nerd culture. He lived it. When he's describing Wade geeking out over some obscure Atari game or quoting WarGames, there's this genuine enthusiasm that you can't fake. It's not an actor reading words about nostalgia; it's someone who actually gets misty-eyed about the same stuff.
His Wade voice hits this perfect balance of earnest and self-aware. The kid's a little cringe sometimes (intentionally), but Wheaton plays it with enough warmth that you root for him anyway. Art3mis gets a slightly sharper edge in her dialogue delivery, and Aech comes through as genuinely warm and grounded. I'll be honest though - some of the villain voices blend together a bit. The IOI corporate goons all kind of sound the same, but honestly? That might be the point. They're meant to be interchangeable suits.
The OASIS is Basically AWS But Fun
I kept thinking about this while listening - the OASIS is basically what would happen if you gave AWS engineers unlimited budget and told them to build a metaverse. Cline actually gets the technical stuff mostly right, which is refreshing. The way he describes the world-building, the economy, the server architecture - it tracks. As someone who spends her days thinking about distributed systems, I appreciated that he didn't just hand-wave the infrastructure.
The puzzle-hunt structure is addictive. Each gate, each key, each challenge - it's basically gamification done right. I found myself speeding up to 1.75x during some of the exposition dumps (there are a few, especially in the first third when Cline is establishing the world), but then dropping back to 1.25x during the actual challenges because I wanted to solve them alongside Wade.
And yeah, the 80s references are constant. Like, constant. If you didn't grow up with parents who forced you to watch Blade Runner and play Zork, some of this might feel like homework. But for me? It was like someone turned my childhood into a treasure hunt. Every reference felt like a little dopamine hit.
What Might Bug You
Okay, fair warning: this book has some pacing issues in the middle. There's a section where Wade is basically grinding - leveling up, studying, preparing - and it drags. I actually zoned out during a few of those commutes and had to rewind. Wheaton does his best to keep the energy up, but there's only so much you can do with "and then I memorized another John Hughes movie."
Also, the romance subplot is... fine? It's not bad, it's just very YA. Which makes sense - Wade is a teenager. But some of the Art3mis stuff made me cringe a little. (Don't tell Kevin I said that, he thinks I'm a romantic.)
The other thing - and this is more about the book than the audiobook - is that the villains are pretty one-dimensional. IOI is evil because they're corporate and want to monetize everything. Which, like, valid criticism of late-stage capitalism, but it's not exactly nuanced. Wheaton gives the IOI characters appropriately slimy voices, but there's not much depth there to work with.
Perfect For: Train, Gym, Long Drives
This is basically the platonic ideal of a commute book. The chapters are well-paced for 45-minute chunks, the action is engaging enough to keep you alert at 6AM, and you don't need to take notes to follow the plot. I listened to probably 60% of this on Caltrain, 30% at the gym, and 10% while doing laundry.
The audio production is clean - no weird volume fluctuations, no background noise. Just Wil Wheaton and his infectious enthusiasm for 15 hours.
If you saw the Spielberg movie and thought "that was fun but shallow" - the book is deeper. More time with the characters, more elaborate puzzles, more world-building. The movie is a highlight reel; the audiobook is the full experience.
The Verdict
The ROI on this audiobook is high. 15 hours of entertainment that made my commute something I actually looked forward to. Is it literature? No. Is it a perfectly executed piece of nostalgic wish-fulfillment with a narrator who was literally born to read it? Absolutely.
I finished this in about 8 commutes and immediately started the sequel. No regrets.
