Neoliberal Double Feature: Chapter 1 (and Chapter 1 ONLY) of Ready Player Two… and A Promised Land

My dear readers, I simply cannot read Ready Player Two.

Thanks to Armada, Ernest Cline’s other nostalgia-porn bildungsroman about a teenage boy who suddenly becomes one of the most important people on the planet because he’s good at video games and knows a lot of pop culture trivia about the 80s (Cline’s “oeuvre”), I assumed that I was eagerly anticipating this book for this blog. But now that it’s here, thinking critically about every moment of questionable quality in Ready Player Two feels like a full-time job with endless busywork.

There are already meticulous, bewildered, doing the lord’s work–ass analyses of how bad it is, courtesy of folks such as Laura Hudson and Jacob Mercy (for which Cline promptly DMCA’d many excerpts off of Twitter, which is ironic given that even the positive takes on Ready Player Two have noted that the film adaptation probably can’t use the book’s “best part” because it centers around a battle against seven different copies of – checks notes – Prince). As Conor Lastowka of the 372 Pages We’ll Never Get Back podcast put it, with the accompanying actual text from the actual book, Ready Player Two “is beyond parody”:

I bent down to read the inscription: GSS—13th Floor—Vault #42–8675309. […] Of course Halliday had put them there. In one of his favorite TV shows, Max Headroom, Network 23’s hidden research-and-development lab was located on the thirteenth floor. And The Thirteenth Floor was also the title of an old sci-fi film about virtual reality, released in 1999, right on the heels of both The Matrix and eXistenZ. […]
There it was: number 42. Another of Halliday’s jokes—according to one of his favorite novels, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the number 42 was the “Ultimate Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything.”
I just stood there for a few seconds, reminding myself to breathe. Then I punched in the seven-digit combination from the egg’s inscription into the code pad beside the vault door: 8-6-7-5-3-0-9, a combination no self-respecting gunter would have trouble remembering. Jenny, I’ve got your number. I need to make you mine….

This is in the first five pages. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a book commit so deeply to being a litmus test for itself, but here you go. Ready Player Two exists now.

When Ariel and I decided we needed a hiatus from chapter-by-chapter recaps, both Midnight Sun and Ready Player Two were announced with an immediacy that I couldn’t help but take personally. And yet, much like the former led me to conclude there is simply nothing left to say about Twilight in 2020, there is possibly nothing that feels like a more blatant squandering of my time on this earth than doing a page-by-page breakdown of how it’s funny that Ready Player Two is terrible beyond belief. Much the opposite, I can kind of just… believe it.

Is it even contrarian entertainment at this point to have an explainer about the ways in which that excerpt simply isn’t good? That Cline is still bad? The reception of Cline’s work, including Ready Player One itself, has gotten more critical since its warm reception in 2011. If 2011’s Ready Player One exists to fetishize the 80s, it’s almost like 2020’s Ready Player Two exists to fetishize 2011.

What I mean by that is that the brand-new, bestselling Ready Player Two exists less as a book and as more of a desperate, nostalgic time machine to the seemingly less complicated year of 2011. What I mean by that is that culture evolves fast, and an instantly excoriated sequel that was widely hate-read on Twitter after nearly a decade of the franchise exponentially turning into a joke nonetheless already being made into a movie has to raise some questions.

You know how you can sort of answer a question with another question? I’m going to pose a question with another answer. I’ve decided that’s a thing I can do now. We can go on this journey together. I believe in us.

You know what other book came out in the twilight of 2020 (not Midnight Sun, literally the Twilight of 2020), has become a bestseller to a culture that’s been moving on past it for a few years now, and had an excerpt roasted on social media for how little self-awareness it had of how embarrassing it was now in 2020, turning a mere paragraph into an existential void of purpose? What if I said… Barack Obama’s new memoir, A Promised Land? Because I’m saying that. I am saying that A Promised Land is also a paradox of nostalgia bait for itself, a time machine to 2011, and generally just not good to read. Because much like Ready Player Two, it’s kind of… just reading itself and doesn’t really need you there.

I’m gonna have to explain this and unfortunately I only know one horribly flawed way to do it. Here we are, BBGT in 2020: I have to crack these open and break down what’s going on. But I am not reading these books. There are not the hours in the day for that. But I can’t squander this connection between Ready Player Two and the Barack Obama memoir! Ridiculous.

So I’m only reading the first chapter of each book. Just the one. Waiting for a book to “get better” is a luxury. The first chapter is enough to show how these books don’t just utilize nostalgia: by doing nothing to hook or even ask anything new of a reader, they’re preemptively nostalgic for themselves.

Buckle up, it’s a long read. Take a break if you need to! There are sections!

1. Ready Player One: Very Briefly

We didn’t even cover Ready Player One on this blog in our chapter-by-chapter era, so you’d be forgiven for not really remembering what we’re supposed to care about. Here is where I should briefly recap as much of Ready Player One as you need to know to understand (the first chapter of) the sequel in as few words as possible.

I should.

But having already bitten off more than I can chew by deciding I couldn’t possibly talk about Ready Player Two without also talking about Barack Obama (getting to that), I have also decided it would not be worth summarizing Ready Player One if (as I have previously wasted my time writing needlessly complicated summaries before) I can’t do it in the style of an overcommitted Ernest Clinean cultural reference.

So here is a Shakespeare sonnet rewritten to be about Ready Player One.

Shall I compare thee to the gamer Wade?
Thou art not learned of nineteenth decade eight:*
Rough times on planet earth with no real aid, 
An online world is what we habitate;

Some years had passed and yet no winner shines
On Halliday's contest, and odds had slimm'd;
And every bit from bit of life declines 
Without a change in leadership yet win'd;

But Wade's pop culture wisdom did not fade;
He gain'd possession fair of that OAS'S;†
None can escape its economic shade,
And so he p much runs the whole world. Great.

   So long as Wade can breathe or use PC,
   So long lives 'SIS,‡ and 'SIS gives life its mean'.§

*Is it not clear that the 1980s are the ninteneeth eighth decade what do you mean this is a stretch
†”OAS’S” is totally a valid shorthand for “OASIS”, the online universe where everybody effectively lives their lives because the real world is a hellscape of socioeconomic and environmental waste and furthermore it definitely rhymes with “eight” what do you mean this is a stretch your face is a stretch
‡”‘SIS” is also valid
§Which is a reference to William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18, which was written in 1609, now commonly known for its first line “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day”, the parody and subsequent explanation of which is a reference to the writing style of Ernest Cline, as used in Ready Player One (2011), Armada (2015), and Ready Player Two (2020) to pay homage by means of reference to other cultural works popular with its audience without particularly working them into the text but rather just by listing them in the text for recognition alone; in doing so, the explanation (this one) becomes not only a parody of the writing style of Ernest Cline (see: Ready Player One, etc), but a more accurate parody of Cline than the effort of rewriting Shakespeare is a parody of Shakespeare¶
¶Although now I might be parodying David Foster Wallace

Just in case that somehow wasn’t helpful enough, all you really need to know is that Ready Player One is a book about a future where none of our problems have been solved – mass poverty, environmental catastrophe, nothing – and have only gotten worse. And then none of these issues are actually explored by the book. Instead, the focus is on how society effectively lives their entire lives in a virtual world called The OASIS.

The creator of The OASIS – James Halliday – died some years back but left control of his massively important company to whoever wins a scavenger hunt based entirely on his personal interests in 80s pop culture. The entire story is a teenage boy named Wade winning this scavenger hunt (and the friends and enemies he makes along the way, but anything they actually did doesn’t affect the plot too much, so they’re not worth mentioning in the barest bones recap – sorry, every character who isn’t a white man) and becoming the richest person in the world in charge of the most important technology in the world. Based on meeting the lone, exceptionalism-laden criteria of knowing a lot about the pop culture of the 80s that another straight white man cared about. Nothing could possibly go wrong here.

It is unclear if Ready Player Two is aware of the sarcasm.

2. Ready Player Two: Chapter One

(Technically this is part of a section titled “Cutscene” that functions as a prologue, not the section titled “0001”, but it wouldn’t make sense to skip this, and the Cutscene has a ding dang page break partway through it. So for linearity and simplicity’s sakes, this is the first chapter. This is my first offense, unless you count the shock value premise of an Ernest Cline–Barack Obama double feature to begin with.)

Ready Player Two picks up nine days after where Ready Player One left off. Wade has won Halliday’s contest and control of the OASIS, and he has not logged back into the OASIS in that time. When he does log on – now in his top floor office of the skyscraper of the company he now owns – he immediately teleports away from the crowd gathered around where his avatar was last online into… the top floor office of the skyscraper of the company he now owns, but virtually this time. In his new virtual office, he finds a new clue left for him by Halliday directing him to a location in his new real-world office, so he logs out of his virtual office again to explore his real-world office. I’m sorry for how tedious this summary is starting off, but I assure you that in the context of this book – if you read the previous excerpt where he painstakingly explains what the numbers 13, 42, and 8675309 mean – you don’t know what tedious is.

In the vault, Wade finds an egg-shaped object. Wade explains to us that the bottom is weighted, so it wobbles but remains upright. Wade explains to us “like a Weeble.” Wade explains to us “Weebles wobble, but they don’t fall down.” I hope it is starting to make sense why I’m not going to read this entire book. This is, like, page four.

Wade opens the egg to find a strange new headset and a video message from Halliday. The plot, as it were, thickens.

“The device you now hold in your hands is an OASIS Neural Interface, or ONI.” He pronounced it Oh-En-Eye. “It is the world’s first fully functional noninvasive brain-computer interface. It allows an OASIS user to see, hear, smell, taste, and feel their avatar’s virtual environment, via signals transmitted directly into their cerebral cortex. […] “In other words, the ONI allows you to relive moments of other people’s lives. To see the world through their eyes, hear it through their ears, smell it through their nose, taste it with their tongue, and feel it through their skin.”

Halliday’s message not only reveals the premise of the sequel, but also shows its hand:

“The ONI is the most powerful communication tool humans have ever invented. And I think it’s also probably the last one we will ever need to invent.”

…said the last message of the richest man in the world to the newest richest man in the world in which nobody has yet to do anything about the world on the very cusp of uninhabitability. Yep. This is exactly what I expected from Ready Player Two.

Halliday’s message explains that Wade has now been given the schematics, software, and documentation for the new technology. Halliday explains that he left this technology locked up in a vault his entire life because he wasn’t sure if it would help or hurt humanity, implying that the timing never seemed right in his lifetime, and explaining that he left the decision to his successor to “decide when—or if—the world is ready for this technology.” Wade’s reaction to this news immediately suggests that Halliday’s hobby-based criteria for choosing a successor were perhaps problematic.

If the ONI could do everything Halliday claimed, then he’d once again done the impossible. Through sheer force of will and brainpower, he’d once again turned science fiction into science fact, without much regard for the long-term consequences. […] I sat there for a long time. Could this be some sort of posthumous practical joke? […] Why would he have kept it a secret?

Despite going from “without much regard for the long-term consequences” to “why not release this to the world” in about half a page, it gets even worse in about one sentence.

Why not just patent it

TO RECAP IN METAPHOR: Jeff Bezos dies and Willy Wonkas control of Amazon to whoever knows the most about his favorite tv show. A white teenage boy ends up taking control of Amazon and finds secret locked-up Amazon technology beyond what was ever understood to be possible – eg, a brain-scanning hat that fills your Amazon cart based on your thoughts or something; fill in the blank with whatever you feel worst about – with a message reading “Look, even I, Jeff Bezos, don’t know how I feel about this one. You figure it out when I’m burning in hell, assuming I didn’t figure out how to consolidate hell before I died.” And the teenager now in charge of Amazon’s first thought is “holy shit… why didn’t Jeff Bezos patent this?“

This is the hell Ready Player Two promises us.

Lots of books start off with its main character making a naive mistake, but this the sequel. Wade presumably has already had a whole book of learning about his personal shortcomings, but the sequel either conveniently ignores that or – oddly insightfully – recognizes Wade has newly acquired the biggest personal shortcoming of all: he got rich.

Wade takes the ONI to his office, reads the warnings, and logs on, greeted by a narratively convenient but contextually nonsensical welcome screen reading:

READY PLAYER TWO

It is here that we must address the fact that the words “Ready Player Two” pose not merely an editorial nightmare, but an existential nightmare.

3. For What Does a Player Two Ready?

While this is not going to be a new chapter-by-chapter recap, this isn’t a review either. Primarily because, as I stated from the onset, I don’t want to read it. I’ve enjoyed reading reviews of it, however, admittedly for the pleasure of reinforcing what I already assumed would be the case: that Ready Player Two is as badly written as the first one, that Ernest Cline remains a problematic author when writing about race and gender, and that neither seem to have any self-awareness of the discrepancy between what the book wants to be and actually is about. On the ironic plus side, I don’t think even Cline could argue against the pleasure of indulging in the echo chamber, since this is exactly what Ready Player One was: a joy at the tier of a light beach read, provided you’re already on board.

The phrase “ready player one” has its origins in old video game user interface. It is language signaling to the player that it is now time to prepare yourself to play the game. It signals that the future has become the present. It is a verb. There is an irony, then, in that these books that take their names from this language are exclusively not for the unprepared. Instead, the “ready” in Ready Player Two means rather the opposite. The stories demand you already align with a shared experience. The “ready” signals that the past has come to relevance in the present. It is an adjective.

Player Two is already Ready.

I mean, sure, Ready Player Two is a sequel, but ignore that for a moment. We’ve read that first chapter together now. The writing is pretty clunky and alienating. The main character isn’t compelling (especially as the main character of a sequel who all of a sudden seems dumber). The plot it sets up doesn’t suggest a story that particularly builds upon the first book (what if everyone lived in a cool new virtual reality and also the narrator was bafflingly naive? Gotcha – that’s the first book!). What actually works about this as a hook? It’s not like things can’t get better after the first chapter (although, again, doesn’t sound like it does – the plot evidently becomes another trivia contest/scavenger hunt), but the first chapter is important not just in communicating to the reader what they’re going to read, but why. The best you can say, based on this first chapter and how it kicks things off, is that it’s gonna be more of the same, so that’s cool if you’re into that.

While a friend and I were sharing the juiciest tweets from the aforementioned thread dragging the worst excerpts from the book, my friend came across a critical reply I can’t stop thinking about. Someone (I’m not going to link and put some rando on blast, but rest assured this is real) replied with a spicy hot counter-take that “The book has been out for less than 24 hours and you’re already spoiling it for people”.

This take? This is a take that is Ready.

This isn’t necessarily a shot at the larger “is spoiler culture bad” discourse. And who knows how or why this person left a critical comment seemingly in the middle of a days-long Twitter thread they didn’t agree with; Ariel reminded me that Twitter’s algorithm can just make tweets from people you don’t even follow show up on your feed. But why I feel it’s worth writing more words about this one tweet than so much as one more chapter of Ready Player Two is not because I hate reading Ready Player Two it questions the utility of spoilers, but unintentionally questions the utility of art itself.

This seems as good a time as any to mention (warn???) that Ariel suggested this section becomes “too academic”. While I think I made it funnier, I also think it’s funny to just lean into that. Perhaps this is a good section to read with some classical music (perhaps Beethoven’s 6th symphony), by a roaring fireplace (perhaps a crackling birchwood), or while swirling a glass of brandy (idk anything about brandy sorry). Let us be pretentious as we spiral into the academia zone.

This tweet is in perfect alignment with the purpose of art as understood by the pop culture reference bait shop that is the work of Ernest Cline: that art and culture as a whole is the consumption of novel experiences. Wade’s value is not in his critical capacity regarding all the 80s pop culture he has consumed; Wade’s value – to the literal economy, mind – is strictly in how much 80s pop culture he has consumed. The art has no value outside of its consumption, and when its consumption has been subverted, when it is spoiled less than 24 hours after the book came out, the art thus becomes without meaning. The desire to think about art? Why, buddy, that’s antithetical to the very purpose of art!

This also not, from the perspective of the market, a take that is wrong. The pro–Ready Player Two take – or at least the anti–thinking about Ready Player Two take – aligns with Pierre Bourdieu’s neoliberal nightmare in Firing Back (prepare for full academia zone; it’s like when a movie tells you to put on your 3D glasses, except it’s more like a sustainably made sweater vest) theorizing that:

What is at stake here is the perpetuation of a cultural production that is not oriented toward exclusively commercial ends and is not subject to the verdicts of those who dominate mass media production …
How could one not see that the logic of profit, particularly short-term profit, is the very negation of culture, which presupposes investment for no financial return or for uncertain and often posthumous returns? … [I]t is the first time in history that the cheapest products of a popular culture (of a society which is economically and politically dominant) [have] not only economic power on [their] side but also the symbolic power exerted through a seduction to which the victims themselves contribute. …
When, as Ernst Gombrich pointed out, the ‘ecological conditions of art’ are destroyed, art soon dies. Culture is threatened because the economic and social conditions in which it can develop are profoundly affected by the logic of profit.

If the market value of art is as a cultural-economic signifier to be consumed, then as little more than a consumable list of other cultural-economic signifiers which is the sequel to another consumable list of cultural-economic signifiers, is Ready Player Two the most art that art can be? (And is Avengers: Endgame the second-most, through the power of vertical integration?)

The failures of Ready Player Two to have a compelling first chapter are perhaps more about this relationship between art and late capitalism than about the shortcomings of its actual plot. As an introduction to a story, chapter one of Ready Player Two isn’t even the first chapter of Ready Player Two. Nor is the first half of the sort of prologue that I’m pretending is chapter one. Nor is Ready Player One even. In reality, chapter one is everything that has happened before its publication on November 24, 2020. As Samantha Nelson writes in her review of Ready Player Two for AV Club (emphasis mine):

The squad of ’80s-obsessed young adults in Cline’s vision of 2048 doesn’t really have a good answer to this critique, which could just as easily be leveled at Cline and his readers. Ready Player Two reads like a fusion between a Wikipedia page and a video game walk-through: It makes copious references but absolutely ensures readers get the joke by having characters share the source of a quote while also making it clear that it’s shameful to not already know this.

The words “Ready Player Two” thus form an implicit trick question. There is nothing for Player Two to Ready itself for; instead, the appropriate video game user interface copy would be “New Game Plus”. You could argue this isn’t exactly uncommon for a sequel, but a sequel should still endeavor to have its own reason for being, and, as has been discussed throughout, Ready Player Two doesn’t even a rehash of Ready Player One, but a rehash of the conditions of 2011 in which it thrived. As I wrote (nervously checks word count) a few thousand words ago (hahahaha fuck), Ready Player Two is less a book and more a time machine to when a book like this could cut it.

But why write a time machine? Because you’re concerned about legacy. And why are you so concerned about legacy that you have to write a time machine? Because you’re concerned that legacy doesn’t hold up.

4. A Promised Land: Chapter One

If you skipped to this section out of curiosity, hey, I get it, but you’re gonna be supremely confused why I keep talking about Ready Player Two.

We’ve never actually read any memoirs for Bad Books, Good Times, since it’s a pretty different beast making fun of a real person’s account of their own life as opposed to making fun of a fictional story (as obvious as an author-insert character may be). And, as possibly comes as very little surprise, Barack Obama is a better writer than Ernest Cline. (Ariel suggested that it’s his ghost writers who are the better writers in question, which is probably true, although you gotta wonder about the uniquely indulgent ghost writer(s) who simply cannot write less than a 768-page first volume of a memoir.) A Promised Land is not the usual teehee flavor of “bad” that Ready Player Two is, but it does coincidentally have an oddly similar purpose. Much like Ready Player One (seriously – you had like 3300 words of time to back out of how batshit this was gonna get), Obama is also not as popular as he was in 2011.

A Promised Land has Ready Player Two‘s “shouldn’t this first chapter suggest who is this for and why?” problem. Maybe it’s less surprising that a former president’s memoir is for someone who’s already on board, but there’s the same “the value of the art is the consumption of the art” problem implicit for the reader of either book. It’s a book for someone who doesn’t need the first chapter to ask you to hear it out. For someone who has experienced the years 2016 through 2020 and yet not wavered too terribly much in their critical understanding of the Obama administration. For someone who needs Obama’s own personal reassurance that Obama’s legacy holds up.

For someone who would like Obama to sit down with them and say, “Look, I too had a flirtation with socialism… literally!”

My interest in books probably explains why I not only survived high school but arrived at Occidental College in 1979 with a thin but passable knowledge of political issues and a series of half-baked opinions that I’d toss out during late-night bull sessions in the dorm.

(I mean whom amongst us but)

Looking back, it’s embarrassing to recognize the degree to which my intellectual curiosity those first two years of college paralleled the interests of various women I was attempting to get to know: Marx and Marcuse so I had something to say to the long-legged socialist who lived in my dorm; Fanon and Gwendolyn Brooks for the smooth-skinned sociology major who never gave me a second look; Foucault and Woolf for the ethereal bisexual who wore mostly black. As a strategy for picking up girls, my pseudo-intellectualism proved mostly worthless; I found myself in a series of affectionate but chaste friendships.

There’s a lot to unpack in this odd neoliberal version of Ready Player Two‘s opening salvo of Max Headroom, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and “Jenny” references. The funniest one is probably that the combination of the words “ethereal” and “bisexual” is woefully straight. A close second would be that such passages are at times indistinguishable from the celebrity memoir of Cazzie David. But the groan-worthiest one is that, much like how Ready Player Two asks that you already know the meaning of its cultural signifiers otherwise you don’t deserve to have any fun here, A Promised Land does the same trick with its dismissal of any politics further to the left than Obama’s as mere party tricks to try to get laid. It doesn’t tell you why. You’re supposed to already be Ready. Just like Nelson observed about Ready Player Two, A Promised Land also makes it clear that it’s shameful to not already know this.

And while A Promised Land puts in slightly effort for setting up its arguments in this first chapter than (again, surprising no one) Ready Player Two…

Still, these halting efforts served a purpose: Something approaching a worldview took shape in my mind. […] What did capture my attention was something broader and less conventional—not political campaigns but social movements, where ordinary people joined together to make change. I became a student of the suffragists and early labor organizers

…both books ultimately base their arguments on exceptionalism, the importance of just that one right individual, which hasn’t exactly stood the test of time since 2011.

I told myself then—and like to tell myself still—that I left organizing because I saw the work I was doing as too slow, too limited, not able to match the needs of the people I hoped to serve. An after-school program couldn’t compensate for chronically underfunded schools […] The power to shape budgets and guide policy was what we needed, and that power lay elsewhere.

Entering academia zone. I hope that one day Obama finds where that power does lie. Exiting academia zone.

Speaking of exceptionalism, sure, it is perhaps not terribly surprising that a former president of the United States is more or less a fan of the United States. But (long sigh as I remember this is my actual, semi-serious comparison) not unlike in Ready Player Two…

As a young man, I chafed against books that dismissed the notion of American exceptionalism; got into long, drawn-out arguments with friends who insisted the American hegemon was the root of oppression worldwide.

…the premise reveals not a new idea but one it knows its audience already had. The promise made by the first chapter of A Promised Land is the same trick question of Ready Player Two. This is already Ready. This is new game plus.

The version of American history taught in schools, with slavery glossed over and the slaughter of Native Americans all but omitted—that, I did not defend. The blundering exercise of military power, the rapaciousness of multinationals—yeah, yeah, I got all that.
But the idea of America, the promise of America: this I clung to with a stubbornness that surprised even me.

I mean, obviously none of this is written to be an argument. The hook is not in the first chapter; the hook is the cover in the bookstore. The memoir of a former president is probably more explicitly a commercial product than a shitty sequel to a shitty book, but both do the same tricks for the same nostalgic reader. Where Cline uses cultural references to establish the value of his protagonist, Obama isn’t above doing the same thing to establish value for a whole-ass country:

The America Tocqueville wrote about, the countryside of Whitman and Thoreau, with no person my inferior or my better […] It was the America of Thomas Edison and the Wright brothers, making dreams take flight, and Jackie Robinson stealing home.

And the problem with signifiers, here as it is in – and I still kind of can’t believe I’m drawing this comparison, but this is the challenge that gave me the strength to actually open either of these books up – Ready Player Two, is that there’s a false assumption that having the cultural capital of the signifier is the same thing as having a point. What, on a level of coherent communication, is the difference between pointing at America and naming famous people (as uniquely no other country has ever produced a scientist or musician, apparently) and pointing at a secret technology container and stating that Weebles wobble but they don’t fall down?

It was Chuck Berry and Bob Dylan, Billie Holiday at the Village Vanguard and Johnny Cash at Folsom State Prison—all those misfits who took the scraps that others overlooked or discarded and made beauty no one had seen before.

Just kidding! That’s from Ready Player Two. Nah, just kidding again, it is from A Promised Land. But how sure are you now?

And not to get too political about, uh, Barack Obama’s memoir, but:

And in the rapid collapse of Harold [Washington]’s coalition after his death, I saw the danger of relying on a single charismatic leader to bring about change.

lol

5. Against The Tyranny of the Market

As much as I, personally, like thinking about books I don’t actually want to read, admittedly this is a lot of words about coincidences from the first chapters of two best-sellers. None of this means anything. Not even the market agreeing with my comparison, while endlessly amusing to me, means anything:

‘Ready Player One’ sequel, Obama memoir lead bestsellers

Obviously, the fictional Ready Player Two doesn’t really provide answers for why Obama’s memoir is like that. Obama, as a larger cultural zeitgeist than Ernest Cline [citation needed], could potentially, in the conclusions he came to in his memoir in 2020, suggest some of why the 2020 sequel to Ready Player One is the way it is. Potentially. A Promised Land‘s dismissal of the utility of collective action because “that power lay elsewhere” is a product of the same culture that gives us Halliday’s exclamation, in a world past the brink of environmental collapse where one single person has passed down consolidated control of almost every utility to another one single person because he also liked Back to the Future, that a new computer program is “the last [tool] we will ever need to invent”. Not that individualism – the link between the American exceptionalism of A Promised Land and the meritocratic divine right of kings of Ready Player Two – is a problem unique to just these two books (see the eleventh hour pivot to the exclusive importance of bloodlines that narratively tanked Rise of Skywalker), but while it was cliche in 2011, it’s just disappointing in 2020 where we clearly, desperately need more.

Wading into the first chapters to see what kind of vision these two books have for themselves doesn’t tell us too much, of course, but it does suggest they share a similar existence that offer little in the way of ideas but a lot in the way of tapping a nostalgia-eager market, baybee. They might have more in common than you’d think from a political perspective! Although that would require reading the entirety of the books, and, honestly, fuck that, as much as I wish I had the energy I used to have to tear apart like I used to in 20…

Uh…

Wait, how old is Bad Books, Good Times again

6. Neoliberal Double Feature: Chapter 1 (and Chapter 1 ONLY) of Ready Player Two… and A Promised Land: Chapter One

Wait fuck what’s going on what

My dear readers, I simply cannot read Ready Player Two.

Can I write a critique of Ready Player Two and A Promised Land for pandering to an audience that yearns for a simpler time, when the contents of those books would have held up, without critiquing… my own desire to do so?

thinking critically about every moment of questionable quality in Ready Player Two feels like a full-time job with endless busywork.

So am I ending this post with a weird meta bit instead because I don’t have the energy I used to to spend entire weekends on personal projects and call it time off? Or because I can’t think of a conclusion? What am I trying to do here? Why

I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a book commit so deeply to being a litmus test for itself

*looks in the mirror*

When Ariel and I decided we needed a hiatus from chapter-by-chapter recaps and then both Midnight Sun and Ready Player Two were announced – with an immediacy that I couldn’t help but take personally

God, I’m still mad about that. To be clear, I’m not mad that our interests have shifted somewhat since we started Bad Books, Good Times eight years ago, we’re different people who have grown, and our blog has been evolving to better reflect how we want to spend our time. But Midnight Sun and Ready Player Two are such ideal candidates! The idea of critiquing these books, the promise of critiquing these books: this I clung to with a stubbornness that surprised even… me… Oh my god, that’s what Obama said in his bad book. Have I become that which I hate? Am I desperately clinging onto the past?

If 2011’s Ready Player One exists to fetishize the 80s, it can only be assumed that 2020’s Ready Player Two exists to fetishize 2011.

Am I writing a time machine?

Much the opposite, I can kind of just… believe it.
Is it even contrarian entertainment at this point to have an explainer about the ways in which that excerpt simply isn’t good? That Cline is still bad?

Is Ready Player Two the book that finally broke me? That made me realize, no, it is no longer a good use of my time, or even particularly funny, to write exhaustive chapter-by-chapter recaps tearing apart questionable storytelling?

No, that was A Court of Wings and Ruin. I distinctly remember this. That book sucked shit. But then would the problem be…

widely hate-read on Twitter

Honestly not sure if the concept that holds up worse in 2020 is hate-reading or Twitter.

has to raise some questions

Does it though? Does it though.

I am saying that A Promised Land is also a paradox of nostalgia bait for itself, a time machine to 2011, and generally just not good to read

has the serpent eaten its own tail now can i stop writing i need to cook dinner

I’m gonna have to explain this and unfortunately I only know one horribly flawed way to do it. 

lol actually that aged pretty earnestly. I will embrace my goddamn flaws. Thank you, past me, for helping me not worry too much about no longer being further past me, but him still being enough a part of me that, yeah, fuck it, why not claim Ready Player Two and A Promised Land are both exceptionalism-touting and outdated-on-arrival slogs that are way too long to bother reading if they don’t grab my attention in the first chapter. They had their time. In twenty-fucking-eleven. I got shit to do.

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Written by Matthew
Edited by Ariel
Funded by Jennifer, Michelle, Constance, Dana, Jo, Krista, Quinn, Stormy, and all our other supporters on Patreon