Book Review: Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

I am on holidays at the moment. Yay! Holidays!  So here is a blog post I prepared ahead of time:

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Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

In the bluntest possible terms, if this book wasn't packed with nostalgia, it would have absolutely nothing to recommend it.

The writing was alright. Not spectacular, but competent at least.

The premise was actually brilliant.

But the narrative was so full of groan-worthy tropes and clichés, plot holes the size of the continental United States, and no small amount of transphobia.

Look, if you can manage to turn off your brain, it's fun. There are some fun scenes. The final battle, for example, was packed with awesome in-action moments. But there is not enough of that to make up for everything else.

I can't turn off my brain to the extent that this book would require for me to really like it, and I'm not so attached to my youth that the nostalgia factor managed to overshadow good sense.

The amount of buzz this book has gotten is now the most irritating thing I could possibly hear. There are worthier books which have been ignored because they didn't have nostalgia as a crutch.

If you can turn your brain off, and are okay with reading for the fun bits, this book will probably delight.

I cannot, and am not, and so this book gets 2 stars from me.

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