Ready Player Two

I thought Ready Player One was the worst thing I'd ever read.

This book poised an intense philosophical question: what could be worse than the worst thing you could imagine? The answer is to take every bad thing from the original, dial it up to 11, and eliminate any possible element of enjoying the character you're reading about. This book is a war crime, and the battlefield is the brains of young adults. This book is an iceberg floating in the Atlantic and my brain was the Titanic. As I listened to this book, my brain cells were the doomed passengers that resorted to throwing themselves off the edge of the ship, hoping against hope that the freezing cold of the abyss would bring the sweet embrace of death just a few moments quicker.

Here is an actual sentence from this book:

“New applications for ONI continued to reveal themselves. For example, it became fashionable for new mothers to make ONI recordings while they were birthing their child so that in a couple decades, that child would be able to play back that recording and experience what it was like giving birth...to themselves.”

Read that sentence one more time. That is in a published book. I want you to really imagine the journey that sentence had to go on in order to make it from Ernest Cline's thoughts to your eyes. First he had to think that sentence was worth writing. Then he had to not cut it during whatever rudimentary editing process this man has (none??). Then he had to show this book to, at the very least, several people- his agent, his publisher, his editor (his editor is a fictional character, I've decided, because evidence indicates they couldn't actually exist, but bare with me). Then all of these people had to read this sentence and go, “Yep, that deserves to assault the eyes and ears of unsuspecting good Samaritans across the globe”. Then this book had to go out to advance reviewers. And these guys are the true heroes, because they weren't even contractually obligated to read this pile of crap. Upon reading this sentence, they should have returned their copies with a nice sticky note that said, “Nope, nope, nope”. But alas, they didn't and so now here we are. I truly don't understand. Does Cline not have a mother? A friend? Could he not have wondered to himself, “Is this something I would want? That anybody would want?”.

I digress. I'm picking on this sentence because it was so revoltingly strange that I wrote it down. I normally don't do that for audiobooks, because it involves having to backtrack several times. That's how bad it was. I was determined to make sure I captured the suffering accurately. But this level of criticism could be applied to almost any sentence in the book, they're all dumb. The amount of references in this book is seemingly doubled from the dizzying amount of references in the first one. The sheer unlikeably and creepiness of the main character is so questionable, I would have assumed it was intentional and that Cline was going to do a redemption arc, but I couldn't wait around to see. I DNF this book, much to my chagrin. Understand that I made it 46 minutes into the movie Cats, so I have quite the tolerance for pain. But this book was not even fun to hate. Anyway, I checked, and nope, no redemption arc, everyone just loves Wade even though he is LITERALLY the villain of this story. Take this quote:
“Now that my avatar worn the robes of Anarak, I was both Omnipotent and invulnerable, so there was literally nothing anybody could do to stop me. I gleefully zeroed out hundreds of trolls in this fashion. If someone talked shit about me, I found them and killed their avatar. If someone posted something hateful about Artemis, I found them and killed their avatar. If someone posted a racist meme about H or a video attacking Shoto's work, I found them and killed their avatar. Usually right after asking them the rhetorical question, ‘who run Bartertown?'”

You know in Titanic, when the ship is about to break in half, and that Evil Butler is standing in the middle and then the ship cracks open and he falls in? That was the neuron that was forcing me to continue reading this book, and he fell into the ruined carapace of my dying brain as I read this sentence. That is our HERO, folks. He never repents. He never compensates. He never faces consequences. He is our Ernest Cline insertion character, and he is infallible.

Skip this book, unless you like pain.