Ready Player Two - Ernest Cline

Ballantine, 2020, 370 pages

IMDB: 9781524761332

Read: June 2022, age 44

 

Ready Player One, book 2

 

I went into this expecting to hate-read it, because everything I'd heard was that it was very terrible.  I went into the book with more morbid curiosity than an expectation of having a fun read, and... it wasn't completely horrible?  

 

Don't get me wrong - the criticism is all valid.  This was not a good book.  The characters were weak, the writing was just okay, the pacing was a bit jerky, and I really didn't care about the challenges in particular - Prince is someone who I didn't care about back in the day, Tolkien's First Age is a bit beyond me, and I knew some of the movies by whoever that director was, kind of, I guess? 

 

My main worldbuilding complaint is that there was apparently basically no pop culture since the 80s - I don't think that the author is all that creative.  There are certainly more problems as well, but it was all packaged in a way such that I disliked it less than I expected.

 

I bought this at a thrift store for $2.99.  That was about right.  Somebody paid  $35.  Ouch.  That would have been so not worth it.

Rating: 3