Finished Ready Player One for the podcast “book club” 372 Pages We’ll Never Get Back (from a couple of the RiffTrax guys). Holy shit, that book is the absolute worst. Badly written, poorly plotted, the main character has no redeeming qualities and spends 371 pages bragging about how much stuff he has memorized. The “exciting” parts of the book are people playing arcade games inside a VR game or actually just quoting the entirety of Monty Python And The Holy Grail.

It can’t even be interpreted as a deconstruction of nostalgia culture, or a morality tale about how pop culture shouldn’t be your obsession. There’s literally half a paragraph where someone says “I realized on my death bed that there’s more to life than video games”, then the book just stops. The kid is rewarded for memorizing more movies and being better at old arcade games than anyone else. Even when he teams up with other people for the final battle, the only help they give is exposing a glitch to allow him to win. Nothing about friendship being magic, the quest was never supposed to teach them a lesson. It’s just non-stop references and people bragging about getting the references.

Judging by the trailer, Spielberg seems to have scrapped the entire plot, so maybe the movie will have some redeeming qualities? But as a book, it’s just the worst.

I’ve also been reading Devil In The White City, which is extraordinary. Any one of the stories it tells could be a book, but the fact that they’re all together makes it all the better.