Book Report: Ready Player Two

 I. Am. A. Fucking. Marshmallow.

I've noticed as I've gotten older that I get more emotionally attached to stories, both in print or on film. I get weepy all the time, sometimes over stories I don't even enjoy all that much. Hell, for the past week or so, I've been getting all misty-eyed over seasonal music and the thought that Christmas is over for another year.

So it's probably not too surprising that by the time I finished reading Ready Player Two, I was snot-nosed and tear-faced. I even sobbed a couple times. Over a story. Perhaps this has something to do with why I suck at dating.

Not that RP2 is terrible. I had seen some of the reviews before I got a copy for Christmas, and a lot of them are pretty brutal. But I kinda didn't take too much of what I read from critics to heart, possibly because as a critic myself, I've grown to not give a shit what anyone else has to say and embrace my over-inflated sense of self-importance as a media reviewer. But I found that while RP2 falls short of its predecessor, Ready Player One, I still had quite a bit of fun with it.

RP2 opens mere days after the first novel ended, with our protagonist, Wade Watts, discovering a new way to experience the OASIS (it's like The Matrix but different). It's a new headset interface that scans users' brains and allows them to control their OASIS avatars with their thoughts. This discovery changes the way people use the OASIS, makes Wade and his friends even richer than they were and costs Wade his relationship with his girlfriend, Samantha.

It also leads Wade to a new quest to find the "seven shards of the Siren's Soul" and he throws himself into it. As Wade quests, a new enemy arises to threaten both the OASIS and the real world, an old nemesis reappears to cause problems and Wade tries to rebuild old relationships while also forging new friendships.

The front end of this book drags. It spends way too much time trying to make us feel sorry for Wade, as he stews in the wake of his personal failures. This is tough, considering that Wade's obscenely rich in a world where most people are so miserable, they prefer their online lives to the real world. It takes a good 80 pages for the story to really get rolling and RP2 spends that time telling us how much Wade's screwed up his life, how lonely he is and how encyclopedic author Ernest Cline's knowledge of 80s pop culture is.

It's a bit of a slog, but if you can get through that, the story finally starts taking off and once RP2 gets going, it's an enjoyable story that really engages the movie projector in your head. I've said my times that originality these days is mostly found in how a creator puts together ideas he/she has borrowed from other places into something fresh and new. RP2 borrows whole scenarios from pop-culture past and stitches them together to forge its story. It doesn't do so as well as RP1 but it still has some pretty inventive sequences. I especially enjoyed scenes featuring filmmaker John Hughes and music legend Prince.

So, major flaws (apart from the slow start)? I wasn't a big fan of how RP2 retconned Wade's character from the ending of the first story. Having the main part of this story be about another quest through the OASIS seems a little lazy. The story doesn't hit with nearly the same emotional power. And I do wish more time was spent enriching the relationships between the characters instead of the so many descriptions of "lovingly detailed" recreations of old movies and TV shows.

Still, by the time we reach the end, I was invested enough that I still got teary-eyed. Even though they're rich, I still care about Wade, Samantha and their friends. The ending of the book left me smiling and the story contains themes about hero worship and maintaining a healthy balance between online life and spending time in the real world. It's not as magical this time around, but I don't regret spending the time to read Ready Player Two.