Ready Player Two

Meh.

I've read some of the community reviews (thankfully before reading the book - my advice, read it first and make your own mind up) and there's a lot of haters out there. I've got to admit I was a bit wary after rereading, and still loving, Ready Player One.

I didn't love this sequel but I did really like it, I was intrigued by how the science of the Oasis evolved. The quests didn't grip me quite as much as RP1 however, John Hughes-land was sweet and nostalgic. I did get a little lost with the Purple One (it just seemed to go on so long) and I'm a bit gubbed with LOTR these days. But then I was sucked right back in and stayed gripped through the final standoffs in the Oasis and reality.

My biggest problem was just how utterly odious Wade had become and so quickly, I was really disappointed in him as I'd totally rooted for him in RP1. But that's the point I guess, you need to to be a total dick to eat humble pie and learn your lesson!

It's a sign of good writing, that I didn't just throw the book down when one of my favourite characters in recent books becomes a knob. I like that Cline is easy to read but has depth and intelligence too. And he throws in references so subtly that I know I'll have missed a good 75%! But it doesn't really matter to the story if you don't get them, it's just fun if you do. And once again my complete lack of knowledge, or interest, in computer gaming wasn't a hindrance and didn't exclude me from enjoying the book at all. I actually really like all the old video game scenes and references in both novels but wouldn't last 5 minutes playing one!

Overall, the novel calls for acceptance and equality, which is a pretty fine message. I particularly enjoyed the examination of what it means to be alive and whether that included AI. Yes, it's been done before, and it's also been done better before, but I think it was an interesting take.

All in all, a big thumbs up for me but I don't think we need anything else from this universe. The characters are going to be pretty busy just living their lives so let's leave them to it. I'll be interested to see what Cline turns his hand to next ...

Con tutto l'entusiasmo possibile e immaginabile dopo aver adorato il primo libro pur con tutti i suoi difetti, mi sono buttato a capofitto sul sequel. Il tuffo però è stato sfortunato e sono caduto di testa sugli scogli.
Il primo problema è che questo libro non è niente di più di una minestra riscaldata e allungata all'inverosimile da chili su chili di politically correct che porteranno il caro lettore, anzi, carö lettorö, a un'indigestione di buonismo di quelle memorabili. Tale indigestione, tra l'altro, sarà probabilmente l'unica cosa che mi ricorderò di questo libro da qui a un anno.
Ora vediamo un po' più da vicino l'opera senza spoilerare troppo. La trama è simile a quella del primo (e già qui qualcosa non va), dove un gruppo di “supereroi” svolge una missione tanto segreta quanto improbabile in cui fin dall'inizio l'argomento principale è l'unico dilemma permesso nella società del XXI secolo: sono maschio o femmina? Come ormai succede nella maggior parte delle opere più pubblicizzate, ormai i personaggi non sono più caratterizzati dalla caratura morale, dalla bontà d'animo o dalle conseguenze delle loro azioni. No, ormai tutto ciò non conta più nulla. L'unica missione accettabile è quella di aderire ciecamente al nuovo bipensiero e l'unico dubbio che i personaggi possono permettersi riguarda il fatto di non essere sicuri, anzi, sicurö, appunto, di stare di qua o di là. Guai ad avere un dubbio su altro.
In ogni caso, butto giù il boccone amaro e mi dico, superato il pippone inizia l'azione. Sbagliato. Sbagliatissimo. Il twist della trama sta insieme con lo scotch, anzi, non sta insieme per niente, e si vede da un chilometro che il tutto è stato scritto in funzione di fare un secondo film, ma che la sceneggiatura originale rispettasse fin dall'inizio tutti i canoni per essere una bastonata sui denti di chi lo guarda ma che inspiegabilmente potrebbe fare successo al botteghino.
Passiamo poi ai personaggi. Il protagonista, Wade, è cambiato rispetto al primo libro. Nel primo libro era facile tifare per lui: il classico “sfigato” da videogame da anni Novanta che si innamora, viene ricambiato (che coraggio, l'autore, in questo caso), sfida i videogiochi e salva tutto e tutti. Nel secondo libro Wade è un miliardario simpatico come un calcio nelle parti basse (e la trasformazione potrebbe starci, tutto sommato) che vuole sempre avere ragione e ha sempre ragione. E qui il secondo (anzi il centesimo) problema. Nella vita vera, Art3mis (l'unico personaggio riuscito e credibile sia nel primo, che nel secondo libro) l'avrebbe lasciato affogare nella tazza dei cereali il terzo mattino di convivenza.
Non parliamo poi dei due “santoni” Og e Anorak - definirli grotteschi sarebbe troppo poco. Inoltre, dove nel primo libro il focus era molto sui videogiochi e sui giochi di ruolo, in questo secondo libro il focus è al 95% sui film. Non essendo un cinefilo, ma anche non essendo interessato ai film in generale, molte parti del libro per me sono state noiose e incomprensibili.
Il libro è stato di una noia mortale, non vedevo l'ora che finisse e ho fatto una fatica tremenda a portarlo a termine.
Incredibilmente, comunque, Wade sul finale si rivolge alla defunta madre chiamandola “mamma”. Ammetto che a quel punto ero sicuro che l'avrebbe chiamata “genitore 1”. Questo sussulto di vita, però, è insufficiente per andare oltre la stella.
In una recensione in inglese ho letto: This book should be reserved only for punishing society's most heinous criminals. Non potrei essere più d'accordo. Da una parte è un peccato perché la scrittura è sempre di ottimo livello, ma spero che l'autore prima di tutto non vada avanti con questa storia (ci sarebbero modi meno dolorosi di suicidarsi piuttosto che leggere un eventuale terzo libro) e, soprattutto, prenda un po' di coraggio e si pieghi leggermente meno all'egemonia del politically correct che ha permeato ogni singola pagina di questo terrificante libro.

Save your time.  Not a patch off the first book and the romance plot is just delusional

At times the scaling of time bothered me, but so well done.

Makes me want to read more about Prince and rewatch Pretty in Pink.

Lacked the magic of the original but I absolutely blazed through this one so it wasn't all bad.

It was a pleasure to hear Wil Wheaton read this story.

This is the second (and probably final) book in this near future, science fiction series. The writer explores the possibility that immersive virtual reality technology will continue to improve. While I look forward to those advances, I can't help being disappointed in how humanity uses this technology in this story. To my thinking, it is unlikely that many thousands of people would spend every waking minute researching and memorizing trivia of fantasy, science fiction, and pop culture from the past. To give a real world example, would you study every detail of the private lives of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs for the possibility of winning a prize? I wouldn't.

Quiz?? sea porque no soy estadounidense o porque soy m??s joven que el autor, pero esta vez la exaltaci??n de la nostalgia en la que se apoya la historia me ha aburrido soberanamente porque no compart??a ni la mitad de los referentes.

Por lo dem??s, la trama est?? bien pensada y, aunque no deja de ser m??s de lo mismo, est?? bien.

I'm not quite sure what the point of this was. It's such a retread of the first book, but with bonus AI stuff added in. I liked the stuff that was like RP1 - the treasure hunt - but didn't really care for the weird AI stuff. It was just a bit much. Overall though I did enjoy it so I'll give it four stars.

(This book seriously needed an editor though. There was a lot inconsistencies throughout - names, timelines, even references to the first book. :/ )

Also, I listened to 372 Pages for this one too and, again, they have some decent points. But damn do they not pay attention to the book sometimes. You had one job, dudes, c'mon.

Nope. Cline lost the magic. Ready Player One bordered on too much. This book is too much.

Well. My expectations were very high, as its predecessor was (is) one of my favorites for the last decade. It was a tough read. Because the main character, the underdog that rose to fame in book one, became a very unlikeable character. After the first thirty pages of book two, I started to hate him. And it took a hundred pages more before his journey of slef-discovery and self-repair started. It took a while before I got there.

And it was an amusing read after all. Made me dust off my Prince collection, amongst other things. But not as brilliant as Player One. And maybe I should accept that that would be an expectation that was impossible to fulfill.

Not as good as the first one, but still good enough to keep me wondering what was coming next.

Wish I never read it, do not know why I didn't just DNFed.

Enjoyable but it was never going to live up to the first book and does feel like a rehash of that novel. It has made me listen to a lot of Prince in the last day though.

So I read this because a friend of mine's wife had a baby, and one thing to keep him entertained while he was up at odd hours was me reading this book and sending him summaries and reactions. (We both loathed Ready Player One, so it seemed fitting.)

This book. I genuinely feel bad for Cline and I feel like he doesn't have support. Because he clearly took a lot of the criticism from book one and tried to either fix it or write a better book. Because you see the pieces. However, overwhelmingly, the book fails in so many ways.

It still has the infuriating pop culture details that are in no way significant to the story and therefore you're like “Why does it matter to me that he's wearing this certain Jordan shoe?” (The answer is nostalgia but like, with nothing to make it magical. Only the name is supposed to scratch that itch.)

It sort of gets better in the middle, if not a bit slow, but then the ending is not only unsatisfying its cringeworthy because as it tries to be hopeful, it's actually horrifying cyber hellscape.

It was ok.

I enjoyed Ready Player One quite a lot as it brought me a huge amount of memories of old video games and other geekery I've always been into. The sequel, however, didn't give me the same vibes. The protagonist has turned out to be a bit of a dick and there's another treasure hunt, which feels like it fails to get as interesting as the previous one. I didn't really enjoy the epic battle against the seven but I bet it might look great in a movie. The book gets better towards the end so keep reading if you feel like you want to give up after the first hundred pages.

This is about what I expected for a sequel in this series... i love the premise and ideas put forth in this book, but they never had the weight they needed. it's a fun book to read, but that's about it.

I read Ready Player One, and Armada, whilst on holiday. They were both good fun at first, however they turned from ‘I get that reference!' to ‘Ok, enough now' very quickly. Now there is a sequel, and here I am.

Read during the pandemic, at home without a constant supply of cold drinks, a swimming pool and sunshine, would the sequel work? Had Cline matured as an author? Of course not.

Without distraction and relaxation, the curtain quickly fell and let the daylight in. The poor writing, lack of tension and plot inconsistencies became jarringly apparent and so, so tiring - did this book actually have an editor? The infamous constant bombardment of 80s references are even more irritating and the characters, especially ‘the hero' are universally unlikable and I could not have cared any less about any of them. Without wishing to spoil, there is a ‘boss' fight that takes place later in the book which is without doubt the dumbest and most insulting thing I have ever seen in a published book - and I've read several Dan Brown novels.

When I'd finished Ready Player One, I gave it to my wife. After a few chapters she asked ‘Is it like this all the way through?' After I sadly nodded ‘yes' she closed it, carefully put it down and never went back to it. I will not be passing this one on to her.

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.

This book seems to share more of the inner struggles of Wade Watts but maybe it appears that way because I was so focused on, and enjoying the memories I had, from the 80s references. There also seems to me more references, and on much broader subjects, than the first so there was alot here that I couldn't match to a memory of my own.

There is the same ‘blow by blow' detail to explanations and during the quests as the first book and about half-way thru I began skimming to get back to the story line [plus the library's due date is looming].

The book presented some interesting food for thought on digital worlds and lives. I was definitely anxious about how some of this might play out in the real world.

The egg hunting middle portion of this book lags hard. Maybe I've fallen out of favor with the hyper references that made ready player one a fun read for the first time. But this time it just feels like too much.

The actual details of the plot and technology are what really shines here. Not the references and meta references. 

If you liked the first one, you'll like the sequel. It shares very similar strengths and flaws.

I absolutely loved Ready Player One, so I was pretty psyched to get into Ready Player Two. This book, however, was a disappointment.

The formula was very much the same, but unlike the first book, the characters' motivations don't make nearly as much sense. There's a huge, overly-preachy discussion of alternative sexuality that really didn't serve any purpose in the plotline. Clearly this was just included to meet the required standards of appeasing the culture fascists that currently run the SF/Fantasy realm. But it wasn't done well and it wasn't ‘integrated' into the story (like Aech's was in the first book) in any way that mattered.

Whereas in RPO, the 80's geek culture reference were very well integrated into the story and felt fun and added to the enjoyment, in this one it felt totally forced and done in a way that just felt “blah.” I imagine based on the reviews out there that many people felt this way about RPO, but I totally loved it in that book. I can't pinpoint why it's so much different in this book, but it was. Also, the romantic angst included in this book was pretty poorly done. In the first one it felt fairly realistic and you were rooting for Z and Arty to end up together. In this one, the gulf was too large and Z just talked about it too much, instead of the feelings being “acted out” in the story.

The gang still gets to go on an egg hunt. They do visit cool places, like John Hughes World, Middle Earth, and a planet devoted to the artist we all know as Prince. These were fun and cool. If they hadn't been, this would have been 2 stars at most. Because the plot holes were huge. Character action just didn't seem to match up with motivation and turned on a dime without explanation. I also didn't like the trope of things getting progressively more and more negative with the hope that the end rescues the whole book. It makes for a pretty miserable read in huge sections in this case. And the end was OK, but didn't make up enough to create the feeling of satisfaction. It took me almost a month to get through the audiobook! That should tell you something.

This was the worst disappointment in years... I loved “[b:Ready Player One 9969571 Ready Player One (Ready Player One, #1) Ernest Cline https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1500930947l/9969571.SY75.jpg 14863741]” and was eagerly awaiting this second instalment. After all, a sequel to an instant classic? What could possibly go wrong?! Turns out the answer is “everything”: Wade Watts was an underdog; orphaned, hunted but optimistic and positive with a great group of friends. In this book, though, he has turned into a vengeful spoiled brat: »I gleefully zeroed out hundreds of trolls in this fashion. If someone talked shit about me, I found them and killed their avatar.« And that's not the only instance in which Wade is completely unrecognizable. Our young hero has turned into a complete idiot. Even his one-week-girlfriend Art3mis has understood what a douchebag Wade has become and left him.His friends are mostly avoiding him but Wade doesn't really act upon any of that - apart from stalking (!) Art3mis, invading the others' privacy, etc. etc. We get told all that during almost the entire first quarter of the book. There's pretty much just Wade summing up how badly he messed up. Even that isn't really well presented: This entire part is mostly just boring and partly disillusioning. Exactly the opposite of the light escapism of the first book. Even worse: It's the exact same premise as in the first book. In “[b:Ready Player Two 26082916 Ready Player Two (Ready Player One, #2) Ernest Cline https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1594220208l/26082916.SY75.jpg 59016474]” we get to read about yet another easter egg hunt - it even uses the same website... Not only does this feel lazy on the author's part but very risky as well because you cannot simply use the same plot devices over and over - which is exactly what Cline tries, though. Plus: Whereas IOI was the big evil corporation, now Wade turned things around and... »GSS absorbed IOI and all of its assets, transforming us into an unstoppable megacorporation with a global monopoly on the world's most popular entertainment, education, and communications platform.« ... now GSS is not much better, “weed[ing] out” whatever they deem “unsavory”. I found my hope somewhat renewed when Cline introduced “L0hengrin” and her “L0w Five” as the spiritual successor of both Parzival and his “High Five” but apart from a few “guest appearances”, this entire (promising) angle remained unused. The entire book feels like a badly implemented game with tons of repeating “fetch item quests'': Wade and his entourage are running one errand after another. Due to the time-limit Cline has imposed upon our fallen heroes they basically have to rush through those quests as well and everything remains pretty bleak and bland. At no point was I ever excited or rooting for anyone at all. At some points, to use the author's own words from the book, “I felt no sense of victory, because I had no idea what had just happened.”. Even Art3mis who was very critical of Wade for a long time, suddenly comes around and practically jumps back into his arms without any obvious motivation or reason... Worst of all is the ending, though... A certain device gives Wade the key to (virtual) immortality and he revels in his new-found abilities in a way that's outright horrifying. Wade's hybris in these final moments seems to reflect the author's who probably wrote this book not as a labour of love (like the first book very obviously was) but as one of simple, basic greed. For an in-depth review of this book, read this one: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3432736506Blog Facebook Twitter Instagram