I’ll admit it, sci-fi has never been my genre. So when Ready Player One by Ernest Cline showed up in the mail as an assigned reading for my English class, I inspected the cover with skepticism. This is going to be a painful read, I thought.

To my surprise, Cline had me hooked from beginning to end. His ability to craft a fully immersive virtual reality, layered with references to ’80s movies and sitcoms, was genius. Growing up in that era, it transported me back to a time when life felt much simpler. Though, of course, I was just a kid.

It was a reminder that sometimes, the books we least expect to enjoy become the ones we can’t put down.