I hate when books invade my dreams – even good ones. In fact, I’ve stopped reading books that I was otherwise enjoying because I couldn’t stop dreaming about them. For a while, I was into gothic novels. I really liked The Castle of Otranto and The Monk, and I had plans to read Northanger Abbey and The Mysteries of Udolpho, but toward the end of The Monk, I started having nightmares, so I stopped reading gothic novels altogether.

That’s what’s happening right now with Ready Player One. Not nightmares, but dreams in which I’m still vaguely awake, calculating what I should do about finding the keys and gates in the novel. And the kicker is that I don’t even like the novel. My annoyance with all of the eighties references only grows. I got to 70% last night, and I’m gonna try to read at least half of what’s left tonight because I’m dying to read something else, but I don’t want a book on the Fail Pile so early this year.

I guess this is what I get for trying to read pop fiction.