Ready Player Two

I finished reading Ready Player Two by Ernest Cline on Wednesday. The best things about the book are . . .

  1. It continues the story of the characters from Ready Player One, which is nice for anyone with an interest in reading about what happens to Wade Watts and his friends after winning Halliday’s prize.
  2. It has a happy, at least on the surface, ending that is a real ending and not merely the lead-in to another sequel.
  3. This quote:

Kira always said that life is like an extremely difficult, horribly unbalanced videogame. . . . Your body is your avatar, and you spawn in a random geographic location, at a random moment in human history, surrounded by a random group of people, and then you have to try to survive for as long as you can. . . . Some people play the game for a hundred years without ever figuring out that it’s a game, or that there is a way to win it. To win the videogame of life you just have to try to make the experience of being forced to play it as pleasant as possible, for yourself, and for all the other players you encounter in your travels. Kira says that if everyone played the game to win, it’d be a lot more fun for everyone.

The worst things about it are, sadly, just about everything else. The impression the book gives is that the author was encouraged to repeat the formula from the first book and to do it fast, fast, fast. And it seems as if he tried to recreate the magic from the first book while also correcting some of the flaws, but without really understanding which was which. The result is a tedious read that manages to spoil even some of the magic from the first book. If you want to read more about it, I recommend this review, which explains some aspects of it much better than I could, from Slate.com: “From the perspective of anyone but Wade, Ready Player Two is a horror story that thinks it is a fantasy, narrated by a monster who thinks he is the hero.”

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