“I finally finished it!
Cue hip-hop horn. Cue parade. Commence shredding up ticker tape and throwing it from the windows of skyscrapers! No time to spread it evenly, just drop it from the highest floor in a plastic bag. God will figure out what to do with it on the way down.
I guess most folks wouldn’t know that I’ve been reading this, on and off, for like…4 years?
I bought it on vacation in Chicago, and it’s been my airplane companion on just about every trip since. Not to mention some car trips, work lunch breaks, all that shit.
This is the book that people are told to read after they like Ready Player One.
Sidebar: Because a movie is coming out, everyone’s got an opinion on RPO, so let me just share mine too. I loved it. I felt like it started out as an I Love the 80’s reference jizzfest, but I stuck with it just a little longer and the book finds its groove. It was the most fun I’ve had reading a book in a long time. Note that I’m not saying it was life-changing and altered the way I’ve thought about literature. It was just so goddamn fun, and that’s what you need sometimes. Anyway, if you liked it, great, if you hated it, calm down with the nonsense about how this book is nothing but references. That’s the same thing that everyone says about Family Guy when they can’t find a legitimate way to critique it. Oh, you mean that show doesn’t always have a strong plot and uses the setup more as scaffolding for joke-em-ups? What a crime! There is one way to make a thing and that, clearly, is the wrong way to make a thing.
End Sidebar
No, wait, restart sidebar: One other thing about what I’ve seen lately in regards to Ready Player One. Can we stop with the nerdfighting where we try to prove who is and isn’t an authentic nerd for the purpose of explaining why something is good or bad? Speaking as a nerd, that’s the most annoying shit ever, and I frankly don’t give a fuck if you’re an authentic nerd or if you’re a wolf in nerd clothing so long as the product you’re putting out there is worth my time. “That dude isn’t a nerd! He knows stuff about football!” And we wonder why we’re social pariahs.
Actual End Sidebar
This book started out awesome, and I could see where everyone was going. You’re in a franchise-ruled future LA, and our main character is delivering a pizza like his life depends on it, which it does, in a crazy supercar. Lots of fun.
Then a whole lot of nothing happens.
We’ve got two characters, Hiro Protagonist (just…I know) and YT. YT is a courier (spelled with a K, but I’m not doing that), and her story is pretty interesting and filled with incident. I might even say RIFE with incident. That’s a joke for people who read the book. There’s a guy named Rife…nevermind.
Hiro spends most of the story learning about ancient religion and then explaining that ancient religion stuff to other dudes. Yes, we learn about it with Hiro, and then a second time FROM Hiro. And to be honest, it’s not all that thrilling. It’s about a fundamental concept, and the book goes a long way to make sure you buy into the concept, but I totally bought the concept way before they got too deep into it. The other sequences are great. The action is really fun, especially the old man who cuts his pants off in order to sneak up on an enemy and cut him with a straight razor. When it’s wild and weird like that, it’s awesome. But the other parts are so long and drawn out that I badly wanted to page through and not read them. And by the time you get to the end, it feels like everything is so rushed that I don’t actually know what happened. Which is okay, I guess, but to get all this information I didn’t need and then skimp on the ending? It’s like bringing yourself to climax by slowly jerking off for 5 hours and then rushing to put your pants back on in the middle of the orgasm.
Too much?
Snow Crash has a lot of awesome, original, interesting ideas, and because they were so new when the book was written they really had to be explained a lot. But reading it in…2012-2017, a lot of it has been ripped off and reused and refined. There’s probably not a single version of Snow Crash that’s better, but there are dozens of things that have taken the most interesting, minor aspects and done them better, or at least presented them (to me) first, taking away their novelty.
So, I don’t know, I guess if you’re looking for something like National Treasure mixed with Da Vinci Code but with a computer world and some other stuff mixed in there, or if you’re looking for something like Ready Player One but with less excitement and more philosophy, go for it. This book is definitely for someone. That someone just isn’t me.”