Ready Player Two: A Novel

I loved RP1. Had it on audiobook and listened to it a dozen times. it was great. Somehow, this book did an impressive job of reversing every single positive trait Wade Watts gained in the previous book. Cline built this flawed character, a child who was selfish and self interested and allowed us to watch him progress into a confident, thoughtful man who intentionally sacrificed his own livelihood to make sure the Oasis from falling into the hands of someone who would have destroyed it down to its core. He created a brilliant but social inept Holliday who was unlikeable but interesting. In it's sequel Cline turned Halliday into a beast of a man who violated one of his only friends for his own satisfaction and made Wade into a garbage human being who I would have rather simply pressed the big red button of doom than witness his efforts to equate himself to an absurd mockery of Godhood. Character sabotage at its finest. 1/5 stars the Prince part of the book was pretty awesome.

I love when people complain about something being woke. It's just code for "I'm not intelligent enough to explain why I fear/hate this thing but I need others to fear and hate it too." This book isn't woke. It has very few parts about something that occurred in history. What's mind-boggling is that these same people are talking about how great the first book was and yet it also talked about one of the main characters lgbt experience. Very hypocritical. Anyways, this book was a fun ride. I felt like the story wasn't as well written as the first because of the knowledge of 80s references needed to immerse yourself in what's going on. The first book had plenty of high level concepts that were easy to grasp what the situation was, while making references alongside. I think it was thought provoking for our own situation with AI even if our own AI will be used for nothing but furthering capitalism. Worth a one time read in my opinion

The book is starting as a proper connection to part one. The beginning at least feels like a warm and familiar place and the basic construction of the main conflict with the AI is great. But the story gets too long over time and finishes with the most terrible ending where the only voice of reason that gets dramatically confirmed in its critique is suddenly not critical at all. This is writing at its worst. Beside that the reference theater starts to become annoying. Every "his favorite ..." feels hollow and interesting as a 10 year old chocolate Santa. Seemingly the author lost interest over his own story while writing or he decided that his capitalist dystopia shall be a utopia now, that can perfectly be controlled by a bunch of super rich nerds and that reality has to be an appendix to fiction. Hail to the billionaires. That is the message. Part one was awesome, this one is obsolete. -- Love goes out to Wil Wheaton anyways. He's such a great reader. He makes even this sound great.