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.
As a gamer, I was intrigued by this book so I bought the audiobook from Audible. I couldn’t even get past the first few chapters. Somewhere early on, the main character thinks about how smart he is for realizing there is no God, then almost immediately afterward he goes back to watching episodes of Family Ties and thinks about how pointless life is. And this is Wil Wheaton reading this. So it’s not just the character saying it, but I could feel as though Wil was speaking almost for himself.
As a person of faith myself, I couldn’t get past the irony of that, so I went online to read a review from a Christian perspective. The reviewer I read said the book is always sullen and never really gets better nor does the protagonist learn anything, so I returned the book for something else.
I don’t understand the point of a book that’s all nostalgia and pop culture references when the story itself acknowledges that such things are worthless and hollow.