Ready Player One

Okay, here goes:

I read this book last year and gave it two stars. One star for the book, and one star for Will Wheaton managing to make it sound semi-interesting on audio. Then recently I stumbled across a podcast called “372 Pages I'll Never Get Back”, where the hosts read this book chapter by chapter and discuss all the nonsense. It made me realize the book is actually a zero and Wil Wheaton's narration bumps it up to one. It also inspired me to write a review, because the rating on this book is staggering.

This is the worst book I've ever read. I struggle to comprehend a book that could be worse. The characters suck, the story sucks, the background of the world makes no sense, it's...you know what? Just assume everything is negative. The thing that grated me the absolutely most though is this 17 year old kid that is evidently some sort of unspoken time-lord that, every few pages, has entire lists of things he has memorized, watched every episode of 50 times, read the entire bibliography of an author multiple times, memorized every word of a band's discography, all while playing video games “16 hours a day” and, later, “working ten hours a day”. Even the most lazy, haphazard math would render all this impossible. I can accept stupid- I've liked greater than zero Transformers movies. But some things are just too stupid.

And lots of people like this book, and fine, I don't get it, but people are allowed to like whatever they want. But you really shouldn't. This book seems to be written for nerdy gamer kids, and yet as a nerdy gamer who was once a kid, I find the whole thing outrageous. It's almost offensive to gamers, nerds, maybe even to kids. It's like a 13 year old just wrote some shit in two days and immediately published it. Where was an editor for this book? What could an editor possibly have taken out of this book to improve it? I would really like to know.

I don't mean to be a hater. I specifically didn't write a review of this book originally because I knew I would foam at the mouth just thinking of all the “classic” references to “classic” nerd stuff and how fucking cool this book is. So gnarly. So classic.

But this book is just too well received to remain silent. If you liked it, great, all the better for you. I only wish I could be right there with you, that the idea of this book didn't send me on an immediate Google search for ways to self-lobotomize. I'd like to meet Ernest Cline and just ask him a bunch of questions, starting with “How dare you?” And ending with “This is a big joke, right?”. Then I'd give him a big handshake for somehow gaming the system and making millions off this and his love for video games. Because no matter how bad I think this book is, no matter how much I want to bathe my eyeballs (ears?) in gasoline and strike up a match, Ernest Cline is an inspiration to us all that your dreams really can come true.