Among Others - Jo Walton Difficult for me not to compare with Ready Player One, though I suppose neither book really deserves it.

Predictably, I like Among Others much more. Part is that it's more relevant to my experience - books and libraries rather than games and arcades, British rather than American - but part is the attitude towards all that stuff that you read and see as an adolescent geek. In RPO, its an escape, a retreat, a thing to hide from the world in. AO has that too, but it also about how reading - and reading genre, at that - is an engagement with the world. How books shape your intellectual landscape and become a tool for a more complex understanding of the real world.