From the Bookshelf of Book Riot's Read Harder Challenge…

Ready Player Two (Ready Player One, #2)

Ernest Cline

Start date: December 6, 2020

Finish date: December 20, 2020

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Nov 28, 2020 Molly rated it liked it

Shelves: kindle, new-adult, dystopia, fantasy, borrowed, 2-and-a-half-stars, good-concept-poor-execution, i-want-to-like-you, meh, read-in-2020

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. This was not nearly as fun as the original. I listened to the first on audio...twice, and loved it. I’ve handed it to so many of my scholastic bowl kids, and I have yet to meet a young nerd who didn’t immediately fall in love with it. This is just another quest, and it feels like a pale imitation of the original. The first story is a quest, sure, but there’s a real world component that made the stakes feel higher. This is just a quest that only Wade, as Halliday’s heir, can even complete, and 95 This was not nearly as fun as the original. I listened to the first on audio...twice, and loved it. I’ve handed it to so many of my scholastic bowl kids, and I have yet to meet a young nerd who didn’t immediately fall in love with it. This is just another quest, and it feels like a pale imitation of the original. The first story is a quest, sure, but there’s a real world component that made the stakes feel higher. This is just a quest that only Wade, as Halliday’s heir, can even complete, and 95% of the thing takes place in the OASIS. It felt very much like I was just reading about characters in a video game. And while I didn’t pick up on 100% of the references the first time around, this time it felt like Cline was going for the deep cuts...which required a LOT of exposition to connect the dots. There’s this whole section that takes place on a Prince planet I that is just interminable.

This actually reminded me a lot of A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor, minus the aliens. There’s an alternate reality that is even better than reality, and everyone wants to spend their time there. Wade basically keeps discovering new OASIS shit — there’s a new helmet that makes the OASIS feel just like the real world, but with none of the consequences - you can experience anything at all and REALLY feel/smell/taste it, rather than just kinda experiencing it through VR. Halliday wills this new helmet to Wade after the contest...and also there’s this riddle about finding “the seven shards of the siren’s soul”, which again, is just kind of an imitation of the keys and the gates, but without all of the excitement. And with a LOT more exposition. Where Hank Green’s novel was weighed down by soap boxing, this is weighed down by nerdery. Instead of characters taking turns being a random mouthpiece for Serious Issues, they take turns geeking out about John Hughes movies and obscure Lord of the Rings stories.

The book opens with SO much exposition as it is. It takes place 3 years after Wade and company won the contest, and Cline spends a LOT of time having Wade explain what everyone’s been up to. I think that’s the main issue here - so much of this book is telling us what happened instead of showing us for ourselves. There’s also several places where something happens off-page that suddenly has an impact on the outcome. I didn’t love being stuck with Wade, either. Samantha is far more interesting, and since she gets to actually log out sometimes, she’s doing actual shit in the real world. There’s also some new characters who’ve christened themselves the Low Five (the original crew being the High Five), who I would frankly have preferred to follow instead of Wade’s whiny ass.

The ending also felt a little too neat - the singularity is possible, apparently. And everything is perfect! I’m assuming there’s a 3rd book coming that follows the adventures of the crew on ARC@DIA. ...more

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Dec 27, 2020 pianogal rated it really liked it

Shelves: dystopia, 2020-reads

This one was fun, but maybe not quite as fun as the first one. I felt like the author took a LONG time to get into it. We listened to the audio book (read by Wil Wheaton) and it seemed like the first two hours was just Wade talking about things. I missed the other characters. Once it got going, it got better. Ending was a little weird though.

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