"Ready Player One" Book Review

Book Details

            “Ready Player One” is the inexplicable success from Earnest Cline.  Described as “Harry Potter for adults” mixed with “Willy Wonka” to the detriment of each of those stories, RP1 follows Wade, a poor orphan whose obsessive memorization of 1980’s cultural flotsam allows him to win a video game contest making him the richest person in the world.

            Along the way Wade recites things without wit or depth and acts like a creep.  This story makes the “Big Bang Theory” look like a high art love letter to intellectualism.

 

"Novel"

Review in Short

This is the first book I ever got a refund on for being so bad I not only disliked it but frequently said, "fuck off" while reading it.

Compliments?

None.

Honestly, to me, this thing has no redeeming features.

I gave it a long time to get to the good parts I assumed must be in there based on its popularity. They never showed up.

Complaints?

            “Ready Player One” is what people claim to hate about “Family Guy”.  It is hollow references to things you like, and the reference to something you know makes you laugh, not because it is funny, but because the familiarity of it gives your brain a pleasant tickle.  It is the same reason children like “Blue’s Clues” having seen an episode a thousand times, they feel a sense of familiarity with the material and that makes them feel happy and safe.

            There are whole pages just listing movies and authors without insight or commentary.  What do I mean by “insight or commentary”?  What I mean to say is, when the author points to something, it is to say it is there, in the same way a tiny child points at a cow and says, “cow” and then will point to a barn and say, “cow” because he is not entirely clear what the word “cow” refers to but both of those things are in the picture book and one of them has to be it.

            That cow/barn thing was a joke, there aren’t any of those in “Ready Player One”.  Like I said, the book will point out something, but its significance to the character is skin deep.  The main character, Wade is shockingly well read and has seen dozens of movies but has the flattest personality of any protagonist in literary history.  It is hard to describe how boring he is.

            I am, in many ways, a traditional style nerd.  I have read a lot of comics, I play Dungeons and Dragons, and have read a lot of fantasy and science fiction books.  I have been around a lot of traditional style geeks in my life, and let me tell you something, NOTHING IS DULLER than listening to a nerd just tell you “of” his hobby.  Not “about” his hobby, “OF” his hobby.

            I respect that even if I do not understand the appeal of something, I like when my friends who are into it explain to me what it means to them.  WHAT IT IS ABOUT.  When my friend Amber (who designed my blog logo) told me that the anime “Made in Abyss” had left her emotionally wrecked and recommended it, I started watching it.  And when I made recommendations of it to other people I made sure to give them a quick synopsis of what I liked, “beautiful world that seems fun to explore, deep mythology, creative and intriguing concepts” (to keep it short).

 

It does have a bit of Japanese weirdness in it, but just enough to make you ask, "Why did they put that in there?"

            See how I just told you about a thing, what it meant to someone I know, and what I liked about it?  I can do that with other things.  I even make lists of things I like and take time to explain why I like them.  I put my thoughts out there for other people to reflect on and learn from.

            “READY PLAYER ONE” DOESN’T FUCKING DO ANY OF THAT!  It just lists things.  What they mean to people, what learning about them taught people, the emotional impact, the creative drives behind them, NONE OF THAT IS THERE.  It tells you “OF” its hobbies.  And its hobbies seem to consist of “knowing” about things, instead of “caring” about things.  The difference between quoting religious scripture (“of”) and being a good person (“about”).

Last year, when a white nationalist rally broke out into violence in Charlottesville I felt like shit.  I hated that the world was getting visibly worse as I looked on.  And when I wanted to talk about how I felt about the situation I talked about the cartoons and shows I watched as a kid and how they shaped me to care about other people and to value the differences that make us individuals.  I used pop culture as a lens to illuminate to my readers what I was feeling and why.

“Ready Player One” doesn’t do that.  And I am not sure if the author would even know how to do that.

The book is fucking boring.  There is an entire chapter in which the history of the “Sword Quest” video game series is explained.  This is foreshadowing for the rest of the book in which playing the game yields real loot.  It is the driest, most basic presentation of the information possible short of just straight reading the Wikipedia article.  I actually knew everything he talked about because I had watched a FUNNY mini-documentary by the Angry Video Game Nerd years prior… Except his documentary went into more detail and was fun to watch.

Couple More Complaints.

The writing is also bad on a technical level.  Unnecessary bits of explanation for things that do not need to be explained.  Sentences that lift right out for providing no useful information are fucking everywhere.  At one point he explains what a ticket is for.

The book is also creepy, like the character's behavior towards women comes off as the most hover-handing, "But you're a g-g-g-girl" dipshit personality I have seen in ages.  It is gross.

What is more I kind of thought that creepiness was just me reading it into the character, but NOPE, that shit is baked in.  Turns out the author wrote a poem… called “Nerd Porn Auteur” about how pornography with the kinds of women he likes aren’t popular.  It is the most MRA garbage thing I have read.  I would write something like this to MOCK twerps like this.

 

Hey look.  A pop culture reference that ties into what I am talking about.

One Last Thing

All this being said, I have a hard time believing the movie (which is what prompted me to try and fail to get thru this thing) could be anything other than an improvement on “Ready Player One”.  The film will be able to show everything the book listed, and a .1 second glance of something while the narrative keeps moving is better than stopping the narrative dead for pages at a time to read a list or Wikipedia entry at the audience.

Beyond that, Steven Spielberg is probably the best director ever.  He has worked on projects of every stripe and has managed to make the material resonate.  I mean, if I hadn’t tried the book the trailer would have sold me in an instant, not because of all the references, but because EDITING IS MAGICAL.  The pace that they keep up, the tone they are putting out there, the punch of it, feels like something.  I think Steven could wring something out of this.

"It's bad to kill. Guns kill. And you don't have to be a gun. You are what you choose to be. You choose. Choose."
-Hogarth Hughes, "The Iron Giant"

Or Steven could totally miss the point.  That is possible.  The idea that the material is presented skin deep, an image without thought or depth is rather consistent with internet culture.  Millions of vain entitled assholes who coopt an image from pop culture that they like but seem to have no understanding of.

Monstrous little cretins that wear the skin of cartoon heroes because “they’re totally badass” without giving a thought to what the stories that made those characters great were about.

Last Words

I felt insulted reading this.

Maybe the movie won’t suck.

For Some More Discussion

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