The Great American Read--The Book of Books

by PBS

  The hardcover design for Ready Player One, published in 2011.

  Author Ernest Cline, photographed at a Comic-Con party in 2015. Cline turned to novel writing after tiring of screenwriting.

  A trade paperback cover design of Ready Player One.

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  READY PLAYER ONE

  Ernest Cline · 2011

  The titular character of Ready Player One (2011) is Wade Watts, an orphan with fierce gaming skills. It’s 2044, and Wade lives with his aunt in an environmentally damaged world where global warming has wreaked havoc, causing economic disaster and social collapse. To escape this dystopia, people play OASIS, an elaborate virtual-reality (VR) game, whenever they can. When billionaire James Halliday, who created OASIS, dies, he bequeaths his fortune to the first person who can solve a series of riddles and trivia based on 1980s pop culture and embedded in his VR world, and the game is quite literally on.

  Video-game designers sometimes leave “Easter eggs” in their work, hidden graphics or puzzles that act as a kind of signature, like a graffiti tag on the street. If you know where to look and can interpret the Easter eggs correctly, your experience is enhanced. As a gunter (slang for “egg hunter”), Wade knows where to look. He leaves his house in the stacks, a tower of mobile homes, and heads to an abandoned van, where he slaps on the required haptic technology and transforms into Parzival, his alter ego. He joins forces with four other gamers, becoming a group known as the High Five.

  Hundreds of pop culture references litter the sci-fi book, themselves a type of Easter egg. If you’ve never watched an episode of Family Ties, can’t name a single character from a John Hughes movie, or don’t know the music of Def Leppard, then you might skim over these various mentions. Although collaging references and in-the-know allusions has a long literary history, Cline’s debut novel promotes these subtexts into much of the main text. The name-dropping and references also speak to the rise of “nerd culture” in contemporary life, where knowing the origin story of every Marvel superhero, for instance, is considered cool, not geeky.

  Ernest Cline was born in Ohio in 1972. He grew up to become a spoken-word-poetry champion and amateur screenwriter; his screenplay about Star Wars über-fans generated enormous buzz but took nearly a decade to finally become the 2009 movie Fanboys. Growing exasperated with screenwriting, Cline turned to novels. At a tech-support call center where he worked, he witnessed employees playing multiple games simultaneously; for many, the world on the screen seemed more real than the world around them. Cline’s favorite game, Black Tiger, features prominently in Ready Player One.

  In the novel, almost all human interaction takes place as a series of 1s and 0s, where people no longer know each other in the flesh but rather only as stylized avatars. High Five member Art3mis appears strong, gorgeous, and female on the screen, but she might really be a chunky middle-aged man in real life. Technology becomes a screen between people and the world. However, Ready Player One’s virtual reality enables authentic emotional connections, and its plot tugs on the reader’s heartstrings in a way reminiscent of the 1985 underdog adventure classic The Goonies, a film that is explicitly referenced.

  Tipping his hat to the universe he so aptly describes, Cline concealed a URL as an Easter egg inside Ready Player One, which led to three increasingly difficult video-game challenges. The first reader to solve the mystery won a 1981 DeLorean DMC-12, a cool car with doors that open like wings, featured in Back to the Future movies.

  Andy Weir, author of The Martian (2011), was so taken with Ready Player One that he wrote a fan-fiction prequel, “Lacero.” It’s now considered a major part of the fictional universe. Steven Spielberg directed the movie version of the novel, slated for release in 2018. Reading a book or watching a movie about gamers runs the risk of being far less exciting than anything you could do on the screen. Your fingers might itch with impatience to get back to scrolling and tapping, your eyes might dart around looking for GIFs and pixelated characters. But Cline’s book speaks to the pleasures of letting the game unfold entirely in your head.

  By Design

  COMPELLING COVERS

  GREAT BOOK COVERS are as varied as great books themselves, but each one seduces you through a seemingly magical combination of color, type, and image. The most influential cover designs have become nearly as iconic as the novels themselves.

  If you’ve been in a bookstore in the past 30 years, you’ve no doubt seen a cover designed by Chip Kidd. One of the most talented and best-known art directors working in publishing today, Kidd has created covers for authors as diverse as Donna Tartt, Ernest Hemingway, and Haruki Murakami. Regardless of the writer or the type of work, he asks himself one question as he begins: “What do the stories look like?” The cover acts like a face, he explained in a TED talk, “giv[ing] form to content.” When tasked with giving a face to Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park (1990), Kidd headed to the American Museum of Natural History, where he bought a book of drawings of dinosaurs in various poses. His resulting effort—a black tyrannosaur skeleton in midroar—became so linked to the story that it was used not only to advertise the movie adaptation but within the movie itself, and it went on to grace countless pieces of tie-in merchandise.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald saw Francis Cugat’s cover design for The Great Gatsby (1925) before he’d completed the novel. So taken was he with the weeping, figurative face rising above a gaudy cityscape that he decided to play up the images of eyes in the text itself. Stephenie Meyer felt that the cover of Breaking Dawn (2008), featuring a stately white queen on a chessboard, perfectly embodies the “metaphor for Bella’s progression throughout the entire [Twilight] saga. She began as the weakest (at least physically, when compared to vampires and werewolves) player on the board: the pawn. She ended as the strongest: the queen.” Not every author felt satisfied with his or her book cover, however. Upon seeing the 1965 paperback edition of The Hobbit (1937), J. R. R. Tolkien wrote to his publisher, “I therefore will not enter into a debate about taste,” instead pointing out that “I do not understand how anybody who had read the tale (I hope you are one) could think such a picture would please the author.”

  Other iconic covers include a line drawing of a carousel horse in orange, designed by E. Michael Mitchell, for the first edition of The Catcher in the Rye (1951) and an unassuming, semiabstract tree adorning To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), conceived of by Shirley Smith. S. Neil Fujita’s use of weighty lettering and an eerie outline of a marionette on a black background for The Godfather (1969) subsequently informed the visual tone of the Godfather movies. And then there are the psychedelic, almost lurid designs fashioned by Richard Powers to illustrate such sci-fi and fantasy classics as Pebble in the Sky (1950) by Isaac Asimov and The Sirens of Titan (1959) by Kurt Vonnegut.

  While designers may develop a signature style, not many can be said to have a style named for them. But such is the case with Paul Bacon, who, over the course of a long career, produced covers for approximately 6,500 books. His signature style, which included a conceptual image, a few colors, and pronounced hand-drawn lettering, is known in the publishing industry as the “Big Book Look.” For a particularly well-known version of the Big Book Look, check out the cover of Catch-22 (1961), on which a jaunty red soldier boogies against a jagged blue background.

  More recently, design trends have taken into account the need for covers to be flexible and beautiful across media, from physical book to electronic editions. Contemporary jackets tend to be bold and minimalist, with a bright palette, prominent type, and a tiny image, if any; the eye-popping red-and-yellow cover of Ready Player One (2011) is one notable example. Shepard Fairey looked to the past as he reimagined the cover for a reissue of Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), co-opting Soviet imagery and even nodding to The Great Gatsby’s eyes with a single unblinking orb. Another designer would have taken a different tack—but as long as the design hooks the reader and honors the author, it just might work.

  Chip Kidd created the striking cover for Juras
sic Park, with the classic image repeated in this 25th-anniversary edition;

  To Kill a Mockingbird’s classic 1960 tree cover was conceived by Shirley Smith;

  E. Michael Mitchell created the classic drawing on the cover of The Catcher in the Rye;

  the 1961 cover of Catch-22 is an example of the Big Book Look;

  the 2011 cover for Ready Player One (2011) is a bold, type-based design.

  A first US edition of Rebecca, originally published in 1938.

  Author Daphne du Maurier called her novel a “study in jealousy.”

  Alfred Hitchcock adapted the novel for his 1940 movie, advertised here in a silk banner.

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  REBECCA

  Daphne du Maurier · 1938

  Readers of Rebecca (1938) can’t help but close the thriller with at least two questions: Was Manderley based on a real place? And what was the state of Dame Daphne du Maurier’s marriage?

  The answer to the first question is yes. Born in London in 1907 to a literary and intellectual family—her grandfather created the creepy character Svengali in his 1894 novel Trilby and coined the medical term “bedside manner”—du Maurier visited Milton Hall in Cambridgeshire during the First World War, when the grand country house was used as an auxiliary hospital. For Manderley, she mentally moved aspects of that house to the grounds of Menabilly, a large, old property in Cornwall where du Maurier lived for many years. She adored that house so much that she would sometimes kiss it. Manderley proved to be one of the most evocative and memorable settings in literature.

  When the unnamed narrator of Rebecca meets Maximilian (Maxim) de Winter in Monte Carlo, she falls hard and fast for the rich and charismatic widower. Upon their marriage, Maxim brings her back to Manderley, his huge family estate in southern England. There she meets Mrs. Danvers, a malicious housekeeper with an obsessive devotion to the first Mrs. de Winter, Rebecca, who died in a boating accident the year before. Mrs. Danvers proceeds to undermine the narrator’s self-confidence, her marriage, and at times even her psyche. When Mrs. Danvers convinces the narrator to wear a dress of Rebecca’s to a costume ball, the narrator learns the truth about Rebecca’s death.

  As for the second question, the book may have been influenced by the author’s marriage. In later years, du Maurier referred to her novel as a “study in jealousy,” and she admitted that she based the second Mrs. de Winter’s intensity of feelings on her own. Du Maurier’s husband, the distinguished British army lieutenant-general Frederick “Boy” Browning, had been engaged prior to their courtship in the early 1930s; this previous partner eventually killed herself. Du Maurier discovered love letters from the woman, signed with a big swooping R (the first letter of her last name). Although both du Maurier and Browning had affairs, they raised three children and stayed married until Browning’s death in 1965. Du Maurier died in 1989 at age 81.

  Since its publication some eight decades ago, Rebecca has never been out of print. Its influence is wider than readers might realize; during World War II, the Germans attempted to use the novel as the basis of a code, but some technology was captured before the code could be employed. It has made numerous appearances in popular culture, from a 1972 episode of The Carol Burnett Show to Stephen King’s Bag of Bones (1998) to the Twilight-fanfic-erotica sequel Fifty Shades Darker (2012).

  Rebecca’s most famous adaptation, however, was the 1940 film of the same name by Alfred Hitchcock, starring Laurence Olivier. Hitchcock played up the novel’s gothic elements and heightened its psychological edge. The second Mrs. de Winter doesn’t have a name in the movie, either, although she was called Daphne during the shoot. In 1963, Hitchcock adapted another du Maurier story for the screen, again keeping the author’s original title, “The Birds.”

  Aside from its exploration of jealousy, the novel questions the inescapability of the past. The narrator opens the book by reflecting on what happened: “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” In its exploration of haunting former wives, Rebecca owes a debt to Jane Eyre (1847). Although the book doesn’t have any supernatural elements, a ghost nevertheless haunts its pages, much as she haunts the house. The ghost is unknowable—she exists in one form for Mrs. Danvers, who worshipped her; in another form for Maxim, who perhaps knew her best; and for the second Mrs. de Winter, Rebecca is someone else entirely. The ghosts that haunt us most, however, may very well be the selves we once were.

  A trade paperback edition of A Separate Peace, from 2003.

  John Knowles, photographed in 1986, wrote the book in the mornings before work.

  A photo and map of the campus quad at Phillips Exeter Academy, Knowles’s alma mater. Phillips was the inspiration for the fictional Devon School in A Separate Peace.

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  A SEPARATE PEACE

  John Knowles · 1959

  John Knowles was born in 1926 and raised in West Virginia, but he fell in love with New England as a student at Phillips Exeter Academy, which he entered at age 15. In later years he would praise the elite boarding school for lifting him out of the South, helping him get into Yale, teaching him to study, and catalyzing his bestselling debut, thereby launching his writing career. Throughout his life, he candidly acknowledged the many ways in which he based A Separate Peace (1959), his first and most successful novel, on his experiences at Exeter in the 1940s.

  As the novel opens, 30-something Gene Forrester returns to the fictional Devon, a decade and a half after graduation. Being back at his prep school stirs up recollections of his roommate, Phineas, with whom he became close, if competitive, friends. The solitary, introverted Gene envies Finny his physical gifts, while believing, incorrectly, that Finny envies Gene’s intellectual ones and therefore attempts to distract Gene from his schoolwork. On the day Gene learns that he’s been wrong about Finny, who truly wants Gene to thrive, the boys head to a favorite tree to jump into a river. Standing together on a branch, Gene wobbles, causing Finny to fall and badly break a leg. He recovers, and everyone considers what happened to be an accident, but Gene feels profoundly guilty upon learning that Finny will never again be able to play sports.

  The truth is that Gene shook the branch on purpose. When he tries to confess, Finny shrugs him off, in part because Devon, like the rest of the country, has become consumed with World War II. Classmates leave school to join the war effort. One friend enlists, only to go AWOL, deeply shaken by what he’s seen and perhaps driven insane. The novel shows how distant wars can touch even seemingly idyllic places, and it emphasizes internal conflict as a form of violence. Gene must struggle to cope with the consequences of his actions and reconcile who he thought he was with who he actually is.

  Knowles wrote A Separate Peace in the mornings before heading to his day job at a travel magazine. The novel’s popularity enabled him to quit and write full-time. It received the inaugural William Faulkner Foundation Award for notable first novel, and was nominated for a National Book Award. He cowrote the screenplay for the 1972 eponymous movie. He also revisited Devon in fiction, publishing Phineas: Six Stories (1968) and Peace Breaks Out (1981), a sequel, along with other works of fiction and nonfiction, before his death in 2001.

  Like his protagonists, who create the Super Suicide Society of the Summer Session, Knowles formed a secret society with his classmates. New members were required to jump from a tall tree into a river, just as Finny and Gene do. Knowles based key characters on fellow students, including Gore Vidal, who inspired the novel’s Brinker Hadley, an older student who is as moral and conventional as Finny is spirited and charismatic. Finny was said to resemble a classmate who later went on to compete in the Olympics, which Finny dreamed of doing. Knowles claimed too that he put a little of himself in the boys, even Gene, but stressed that his school years were a time of camaraderie and closeness, not resentment and revenge.

  Few friendships feel as intense as those formed during adolescence, and A Separate Peace captures that headiness and passion. It’s shocking to grow up and discover just how fine a line sometimes ex
ists between love and hate, between our closest friends and worst enemies, between our worst enemies and ourselves.

  The hardcover design for The Shack, first published in 2007.

  William P. Young wrote the book in between working three jobs. He intended it as a gift for his six kids. Eventually, publishers took notice, and the book went on to become a bestseller.

  The Shack was adapted for the big screen in 2017; the movie stars Tim McGraw and Octavia Spencer.

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