/lit/ - Literature

>>21041653
read it when I was in a "le epic gamer" phase and even then I could tell this book was utter horseshit

So yeeears ago a buddy of mine told me that he thought that Ready Player One is bad because he flipped open to a random page and read a few paragraphs to get a sample of the writing. Is this actually a thing? Can you really get an accurate idea of the quality of an author's writing just from a random, out of context sample? It kinda sounds like bullshit to me.

But then again, Ready Player One sucks.

What's your least favorite book of the past decade, /lit/? For me, it's 'Ready Player One' by Ernest Cline. I despise it and the franchise it spawned. Most books I don't enjoy I forget quickly. Not 'Ready Player One,' it's memorably bad.

I saw the trailer for the movie and thought it looked hype, so I picked up the book. Only for the book to burn me so bad that I never saw the movie. Let's start with the book's start. The introduction is the only good part of 'Ready Player One.' Ernest Cline created a dystopian American future that combines 'Brave New World' with poverty. Unlike how in 'Brave New World' characters take drugs as escapism, in 'Ready Player One' VR video games are the tool people use to escape from their wretched lives. Drugs still exist, and it's mentioned in the first chapter that the protagonist's parents both died of drug overdoses. That's a cool dystopia that seems almost imminent today, and very grounded storytelling. Great start. It only goes down from here.

Cline doesn't do anything with the dystopia he gets. Nothing at all. Dystopian fiction usually investigates and analyzes dystopia: how human societies reach dystopian situations, what the situation is like for people living under the dystopia, and how the dystopias can be ended and mankind's theoretical crises resolved. In 'Ready Player One' though, the dystopia is a backdrop and nothing more. There's a ham-fisted cliche resolution at the end of the book "oh we shut down the VR game on Tuesdays and Wednesdays" but for the bulk of the book, nothing said on the dystopia.

So what is the bulk of the book? 80s references. I'm talking about paragraph after paragraph of 80s references. These references don't assist or propel the story, they interrupt it. There were pages that I read and finished, after which I said to myself "wait.... what happened on that page? There was no dialogue. No exposition. No narration. JUST 80s REFERENCE AFTER 80s REFERENCE. It was incredibly dull. That's the storytelling.

What are the characters? The protagonist is an obvious stand-in for the author, a guy whose entire personality is geekery. Nothing defines the protagonist other than geekery. He doesn't even have normal dude interests like getting laid. He has a goal to get rich, but somehow even an objective as simple as that seems ham-fisted to push the story along. All the other characters are terrible. Ernest Cline has a great desire to have a diverse cast of characters. Usually when entertainment media has diverse characters, those characters either (a) reject stereotypes, (b) ignore stereotypes, or (c) meet stereotypes. (a) and (b) are quite obvious, but a good example of (c) is the Sopranos. Stereotypes of the black and Italian-American communities are portrayed both because those stereotypes are often true and because the stereotypes are useful lenses for looking at characters and the story being told as a whole.

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