A coworker recommended me this book a while ago. I know it's hated fiercely around here...

I don't understand what it's trying to be. like the tactics behind the creation of the piece.

It's geared towards 80's and 90's kids, now in our 20's and 30's, but written for teens.

So either you get all the references and name-drops and dislike it for its childish composition, or you like it for its composition but youre too young to get any of the references

As I said in the last thread about Cline, RP1 is essentially a Tumblr/Livejournal rant about how Fandom Is The Most Important Thing In My Life Mom/Dad And You Just Don't Get It!

It is written for teens that think they were born in the wrong generation and praise the 80s and 90s.

This but it's also banking on 80s/90s nerds being mentally stunted enough to enjoy it.

Jesus, say what you will about John Green-- he hasn't nearly been as Bazinga'd by capitalism as this poor lookin dude. He looks like a total slave to nerd/retro buyers culture.

That poor car is housing the two most despicable writers of our time.

Hah, who am I kidding, "writer" means someone who actually writes, and therefore doesn't apply to GRRM.

Happy Gilmore was awesome and you can't deny it.

I think you severely underestimate the amount of those 20's and 30's people who can't read above a YA level

It's a DeLorean, user. It fully deserves its wretched fate.

Are you implying Back To The Future is bad? Surely you can't be serious.

>He looks like a total slave to nerd/retro buyers culture.

In Armada, a character is set up as a antagonist because he quotes Top Gun instead of nerd movies.

>he doesn't know about DeLoreans

Hooo boy, go to Veeky Forums and ask them about DeLoreans.

Oh, you mean the car itself? Yeah, I was aware it was mostly a piece of garbage, despite knowing next to nothing about cars. It's just that the first thing that pops into my mind is "Back To The Future".

Depends. Did you like this?
youtu.be/O5vmHjJ7LYE

his head looks like it's photoshoped into the picture, badly

Even his delivery is bad. Does he ever stop for breathing?

Not even the worst part.

there is some serious and pointless name dropping there

Knowing what I've come to know of Tolkien and his whole project makes him really stick out among the rest of those names.

I bet this is the part of the book he enjoyed writing the most. And it's probably the part I'd enjoy the least.

Still, while boring, I didn't find anything particularly offensive there. Just regular "look at all the names I can drop, I'm such a huge GEEK!!". That is, until I got to the "I have a cute-girl-playing-ukelele fetish" part. That's truly cringey.

>character is set up as a antagonist because he quotes Top Gun instead of nerd movies.
???

its this some self ironic post ironic text? or just pure trash?

This can't be real

I'm usually very forgiving of the hyper-commercial novels and I rank this as one of the worst things I've read all year.

It was, however, an important lesson in when to read that which seems like it might interest you and not that which might impress other people. Especially coworkers, they're lame.

Also a valuable lesson in how to structure plot in a way that surprises the audience, and the importance of suspense in order to derive any kind of fascination whatsoever. Also a valuable lesson in how not to arbitrarily mess with sentence structures for the sake of sweeping in the literate-but-not-literary older crowd. Also a valuable lesson in why references add absolutely zero novelty to a book (or if they do, how little novelty is worth). It's instructive on what not to do.

If you know these things - and since you're asking for advice about a sketchy book such as this, you might not - then borrow it from a friend and burn it. Otherwise burn _after_ reading. Either way I implore you to will forth fewer copies of it.

Reminder that DFW did this exact same shit.

Silly user, these fucking nerds don't know, and don't care to know, anything about LOTR's religious dimensions and its underlying themes of faith and providence.

As satire. There is a difference, even if an autismoid like yourself can't detect it.

"In my own childhood, late sixties, rural downstate Illinois, miles and megahertz from any center of entertainment production, familiarity with the latest developments on 'Batman' or 'The Wild, Wild West' was the medium of social exchange. Much of our original play was a simple reenactment of what we’d witnessed the night before, and verisimilitude was taken very seriously. The ability to do a passable Howard Cosell, Barney Rubble, CoCo-Puff Bird, or Gomer Pyle was a measure of status, a determination of stature"

"...for far too much of this generation, Salinger invented the wheel, Updike internal combustion, and Carver, Beattie and Phillips drive what’s worth chasing."

"The climate for the “next” generation of American writers [...] is aswirl with what seems like long-overdue appreciation for the
weird achievements of such aliens as Husserl, Heidegger, Bakhtin, Lacan, Barthes,
Poulet, Gadamer, de Man."

"The refracted world of Proust and
Musil, Schulz and Stein, Borges and Faulkner has, post-War, exploded into diffraction,
a weird, protracted Manhattan Project staffed by Robbe-Grillet, Grass, Nabokov, Sorrentino, Bohl, Barth, McCarthy, Garc´ıa Marquez, Puig, Kundera, Gass, Fuentes, Elkin,
Donoso, Handke, Burroughs, Duras, Elkin, Coover, Gombrowicz, LeGuin, Lessing,
Acker, Gaddis, Coetzee, Ozick. To name just a few. We, the would-be heirs to a gorgeous
chaos, stand witness to the rise and fall of the nouveau roman, Postmodernism,
Metafiction, The New Lyricism, The New Realism, Minimalism, Ultraminimalism,
Performance-Theory. It’s a freaking maelstrom..."

"And if Marx (sorry—last dropped name)..."

is the satirical part saying you were just trolling after you feel impressive

why should I bother screening for potential satire if I preconceive that it doesn't have potential to be good satire

>references add absolutely zero novelty to a book
I'm guessing the same could be said of Ulysses, then.

Why, yes, it could. That was something I was >implying.

...

>The ability to do a passable Howard Cosell, Barney Rubble, CoCo-Puff Bird, or Gomer Pyle was a measure of status, a determination of stature"
As satire, as I said.

>a collection of references to great writers and philosophers mentioned for general purposes, not offhand
God forbid

Learn to read before you start reading. It's clear you don't "get" what there is to be got.

>satire
Explain.

>general purposes
I know when I'm looking for new writers to check out, I first turn to obscure DFW essays --

>not offhand
-- indeed, I am assured that it was his intention for me to do so.

it's basically a bad fanfiction.

I've read more capital L literature than 99 pct of posters here and I can say ready player one wasn't that bad. it's more or less on the same.level as infinite jest.

>familiarity with the latest developments on 'Batman' or 'The Wild, Wild West' was the medium of social exchange.
Was it REALLY the medium of social exchange? Did people REALLY communicate by allusions to TV shows? No. It's satire. It's played for humor - as if these things matter, when really they aren't particularly important (although they clearly do matter to this childhood self). DFW has always dealt with the media's influence of people, this is no different.

The general purpose is important - while he may be measuring his intellectual dick against yours, he's not trying to "hearken" through nostalgia. He's not jerking you off. Do you feel any pleasure through getting these references? No. It's just a literary contest. Whereas with Ready Player One, EVERY reference is to jerk off the reader by referencing as many pop culture phenomena as possible. There is no subtlety, there is no care. Just place as many references in there as possible, Cline must've thought.

>Was it REALLY the medium of social exchange? Did people REALLY communicate by allusions to TV shows? No. It's satire.

Ignoring the fact that yes they did communicate like that, and ignoring the fact that yes he is invoking nostalgia: he uses double, maybe triple the number of references needed for that mote of satire. The satire has nothing to do with the list, just with the elements of the list. The same would hold precisely true of a shorter list.

you are shitting me

DFW is critiquing this TV-centric lifestyle, a lifestyle that he himself is a part of. In that very same essay:

>The great bulk of advertising is culturally repulsive to anyone with any developed sensitivity. So are most movies and television shows, most popular music, and a surprisingly high proportion of published books. … But a sensitive person can easily avoid cheap movies, cheap books, and cheap art, while there is scarcely anyone outside the jails who can avoid contact with advertising. By presenting the intellectual with a more or less accurate image of the popular culture, advertising earns his enmity and calumny. It hits him where it hurts worst: in his politically liberal and socially generous outlook---partly nourished on his avoidance of actual contact with popular taste.

For what PURPOSE does he refer to these things? It's not about the numbers, it's about the intent. His intent in the essay is not the same as the intent in Ready Player One. There no critique whatsoever in Ready Player One.

niggaYou can't be 5real

purpose schmurpose

I give a shit about effect; in that regard they are identical.

Cline is worse for trying to appeal to the '80s throwbackers; DFW is bad for trying to appeal to the cognoscenti who'll admit defeat and get colored impressed when their dicks are proven shorter.

What the fuck.

Bill Hicks part gets me every time

Ah yes, appealing to the cognoscenti of readers of the Review of Contemporary Fiction. All, what, 500 of them? He may as well have kept it in his desk drawer.

>I know when I'm looking for new thinkers to check out, I first turn to obscure literary journals

In Armada, the titular video game is made by:
Chris Roberts
Richard "Lord British" Garriott
Hidetaka Miyazaki
Gabe Newell
Shigeru Miyamoto
James Cameron
Steven Spielberg

are you for real?

I don't know. I just think about this video any time I think about reading it and then my eyes bleed.
youtube.com/watch?v=IWh1f301Xb0

>I was only pretending to be retarded.

Prepare for the shitpost of the week

When it came to my research, I never took any shortcuts. Over the past
five years, I’d worked my way down the entire recommended perverted reading
list. Hegel. Hegel. Marx. Hegel.
Hegel. Evola. Hegel .Hegel .Hegel,
Hegel, Hegel, Hegel,Hegel, Hegel, Nabokov and Hegel.
I read every novel by every single one of Zizek's
favorite authors.
And I didn’t stop there.
I also watched every single film he referenced in the Ideology. If it was
one of Zizek's favorites, like Kung Fu Panda, Kung Fury, Ice Age, Frozen, or Kung Fu Panda 2, I rewatched it until I knew every
scene by heart.
I devoured each of what Zizek referred to as “The Holy Trilogies”:
Oedipus , Ulysses (portrait and dubliners),
Kung Fu Panda, Kung Fu Panda 2, Kung Fu Panda 3 and BLACKED. (Zizek once said that he preferred to pretend the other Joyce writings, from
his fart letters, didn’t exist. I tended to agree.)
I also absorbed the complete filmographies of each of his favorite directors.
Wajamba's, Trump, Jackie Chan, Skeletons, His daughter,Hitler, That prince, Marx. And, of course, Hegel.
I spent three months studying every Green's teen movie and memorizing all the key lines of dialogue.
Only the meek get pinched. The bold survive.
You could say I covered all the bases.
I studied Pynchon. And not just Gravity's Rainbow, either. Every single one
of his books, albums, and porn, and every episode of the original Game of Thrones series.
(Including those two “lost” episodes they did for German television.)
I wasn’t going to cut any corners.
I wasn’t going to miss something obvious.
Somewhere along the way, I started to go overboard.
I may, in fact, have started to go a little insane.
I watched every episode of Switched at birth, Das Kapital, Xun Tzxu, The Ego and it's selfishness, The Overman, and The Muppet Movies.

Ahahaha what the fuck

...

A few grammar errors but overall, very good.

What about Das Kaptal, you ask?
I knew more about the bourgeoise than I knew about my proletariat.
Capitalism? Oh, I did my homework. Crisis, Prosperity, Crisis. Even Libertarians and
Anarcho-Capitalists. I read them all in chronological order.
The movies, too. The clockwork Orange locked on wageslaves.
I gave myself a crash course in ’'Capitalism is in a crisis from it's very beginning''.
I learned the name of every last goddamn Post-bolchevik and Trotsky's dogs.
Communit manifesto, Feuersbach tesis, Engel, Lenin, Kropotkin —I knew them all. Because knowing is half the seizing.
Who was my friend, when things got rough? My balls.
Perverted jokes? Did I cover perverted jokes?
Yes. Yes indeed. Balls anddicks. Semen, Scat, dust, sore anus, and my mom's sexual habits. My sister, my belly.
I wasn’t some dilettante.
I wasn’t screwing around.
I memorized every last Zizek routine.
Music? Well, covering all the music wasn’t easy.
It took some time.
The ’80s was a long decade (ten whole years), and Zizek didn’t seem
to have had very discerning taste. He listened to everything. So I did too.
Pop, rock, new wave, punk, heavy metal. From the Perverts to to the Commies. I tackled it all.
I burned through the entire Paul Robeson discography in under two weeks. Soviet's took a little longer.
I watched a lot of YouTube videos of cute geeky traps playing ’80s cover
tunes on ukuleles with their male voices. Technically, this wasn’t part of my research, but I had a serious cute-geeky-girls-with-dicks-playing-ukuleles fetish that I can neither explain nor defend.
I memorized lyrics. Silly lyrics, by bands with names like Van Halen,
Hegel, Marx, and Engel.
I kept at it.
I burned the midnight oil.
Did you know that Midnight Oil was a form of killiung in the gulags?, with a 1987 innovation titled “Beds Burn Too''?
I was obsessed. I wouldn’t quit. My grades suffered. I didn’t care.
I read every issue of every comic book title Zizek had ever collected.
I wasn’t going to have anyone questioning my commitment.
Especially when it came to the videogames.
Videogames were my area of expertise.
My double-weapon specialization.
My dream Jeopardy! category.
I downloaded every game mentioned or referenced in the Ideology,
from Eroge to Civilization 5. I played each title until I had mastered it, then moved on to the next one.
You’d be amazed how much research you can get done when you have no sexual drive whatsoever. Twelve hours a day, seven days a week, is a lot of masturbation time.

I copypasted it from the manuscript pdf I found in google

>Chris Roberts

correct