Is this the Twilight for nerds?

Why do people keep recommending this shit? It's cringey and awful.

Yep, absolute trash. Haven't seen it on lit a lot, thank god, mostly just reddit.

It's so bad that i actually enjoyed reading it

like when you read those screengrabs of neckbeards professing their love to women

I knew from the 5th word that I wouldn't like the book, then from the 2nd paragraph that I'd hate it, and by the end of the first page my hate boner demanded I read it all, which I did in one sitting. It is by far the worst book I've ever read. Every other book I've read seems like a much greater achievement now that I know how low the floor for what can be considered a publishable book really is. Also, I can now hastily disregard the opinions of anyone who liked this book, as I know without a doubt I can't trust them; it's the ultimate pleb detector.

I felt this way when I read The Fault in Our Stars for a girl I was dating. Absolutely disgusted and yet fervently reading. It made my brainlet ego feel good telling everyone I hated it.

I finished it since it was recommended to me but holy shit it is terrible and, imo, not in an enjoyable way.

I like bad movies that are fun to watch, like Troll 2 or Mortal Kombat, but this was more the literary equivalent of Now You See Me type trash - hopelessly awful and hopelessly boring cringe.

It's like the dude wrote a fanfic of his own life from the fantasies he thinks about when he's trying to fall asleep. And crams in every single reference to the 80s possible, even when it doesn't work.

but did you stop dating her

Fuck yeah. And she made me go to see the movie too which was somehow worse than the book.

but Willem Dafoe

HEY KIDS
WANNA DIE?

...

I saw this shit at target. It wasn't even in the YA section.

this is not a YA book to those who like it

>looking at books at Target

Had a quick look at the summary of the other book he's written

>Zack Lightman glances out his classroom window and spots a UFO. The ship he’s staring at is straight out of the video game he plays every night, a hugely popular online air combat simulator called Armada, in which gamers protect Earth from alien invaders. He is fairly skilled at the game, having placed in the top ten among millions of users, however in real life, he is just a high school senior with a reputation of having a short fuse and getting into trouble, having fought a bully student Douglas Knotcher in junior high.

>this dude is FORTY FIVE

that's exactly the same as RPO...why.

radioactive levels of cringe

Ready Player One is worse than Fault In Our Stars. I thought depicting having cancer as kind of mundane and boring was at least interesting. Ready Player One didn't have anything interesting about it.

>RPO is his first book
>there was a bidding war over who got to publish it
>wil wheaton's audiobook version launched at the same time
>writing level is grade-school at best
>content is condensed reddit in its purest form
So RPO was just written by some aging manchild who spends all day on reddit and happens to have some contacts to shill for him, right?

I liked the idea of RPO more than the execution. The weird gravity disco segment stands out as something particularly boring in the way it was presented, even though it should be a cool concept. There's too many references to make the reader feel good about getting them and not enough substance, in the end.

All in all, it's a story that would work better on the screen than in writing. No wonder it's in post-production right now. Speaking of the movie, Ben Mendelsohn playing Sorrento seems like a pretty solid casting.

yeah i can't wait for the sex robot scene.

also all of the movie recreations. that won't be cringey at all.

I made it up to the protagonist talking about his high school Mary Sue then dropped

wow, i just looked through the opening pages to see if it was really as cancerous as the cover and glowing reviews made it out to be. how in the hell did this pile of manure make it past the editor?

>dance moves all indicate that the time period is the late 1980s
two sentences later
>through several signature '80s dance moves

Will the movie be enjoyable summer-core if Spielberg is directing it?

> spelling out the synopsis of the video game because his readers couldn't connect the dots
> expressing a character's personality not through their actions or expressions but in a single sentence
> generic snowflake out of water set up

Thank you for saving me the time from ever going into this guy's work.

> that Billy Idol reference

Ew. Song is ruined now.

stopped reading after this:


>I wish someone had just told me the truth right up front, as soon as I was old enough to understand it. I wish someone had just said:

>“Here’s the deal, Wade. You’re something called a ‘human being.’ That’s a really smart kind of animal. Like every other animal on this planet, we’re descended from a single-celled organism that lived millions of years ago. This happened by a process called evolution, and you’ll learn more about it later. But trust me, that’s really how we all got here. There’s proof of it everywhere, buried in the rocks. That story you heard? About how we were all created by a super-powerful dude named God who lives up in the sky? Total bullshit. The whole God thing is actually an ancient fairy tale that people have been telling to one another for thousands of years. We made it all up. Like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.

>“Oh, and by the way . . . there’s no Santa Claus or Easter Bunny. Also bullshit. Sorry, kid. Deal with it.

cont:

>“You’re probably wondering what happened before you got here. An awful lot of stuff, actually. Once we evolved into humans, things got pretty interesting. We figured out how to grow food and domesticate animals so we didn’t have to spend all of our time hunting. Our tribes got much bigger, and we spread across the entire planet like an unstoppable virus. Then, after fighting a bunch of wars with each other over land, resources, and our made-up gods, we eventually got all of our tribes organized into a ‘global civilization.’ But, honestly, it wasn’t all that organized, or civilized, and we continued to fight a lot of wars with each other. But we also figured out how to do science, which helped us develop technology. For a bunch of hairless apes, we’ve actually managed to invent some pretty incredible things. Computers. Medicine. Lasers. Microwave ovens. Artificial hearts. Atomic bombs. We even sent a few guys to the moon and brought them back. We also created a global communications network that lets us all talk to each other, all around the world, all the time. Pretty impressive, right?

>“But that’s where the bad news comes in. Our global civilization came at a huge cost. We needed a whole bunch of energy to build it, and we got that energy by burning fossil fuels, which came from dead plants and animals buried deep in the ground. We used up most of this fuel before you got here, and now it’s pretty much all gone. This means that we no longer have enough energy to keep our civilization running like it was before. So we’ve had to cut back. Big-time. We call this the Global Energy Crisis, and it’s been going on for a while now.

>“Also, it turns out that burning all of those fossil fuels had some nasty side effects, like raising the temperature of our planet and screwing up the environment. So now the polar ice caps are melting, sea levels are rising, and the weather is all messed up. Plants and animals are dying off in record numbers, and lots of people are starving and homeless. And we’re still fighting wars with each other, mostly over the few resources we have left.

>“Basically, kid, what this all means is that life is a lot tougher than it used to be, in the Good Old Days, back before you were born. Things used to be awesome, but now they’re kinda terrifying. To be honest, the future doesn’t look too bright. You were born at a pretty crappy time in history. And it looks like things are only gonna get worse from here on out. Human civilization is in ‘decline.’ Some people even say it’s ‘collapsing.’

>“You’re probably wondering what’s going to happen to you. That’s easy. The same thing is going to happen to you that has happened to every other human being who has ever lived. You’re going to die. We all die. That’s just how it is.

>“What happens when you die? Well, we’re not completely sure. But the evidence seems to suggest that nothing happens. You’re just dead, your brain stops working, and then you’re not around to ask annoying questions anymore. Those stories you heard? About going to a wonderful place called ‘heaven’ where there is no more pain or death and you live forever in a state of perpetual happiness? Also total bullshit. Just like all that God stuff. There’s no evidence of a heaven and there never was. We made that up too. Wishful thinking. So now you have to live the rest of your life knowing you’re going to die someday and disappear forever.
“Sorry.”

Was it purposely a cringefest, or it's just me?

what did you expect from a book thats popular on reddit?

...

No. A better description is that it's Rick and Morty in book form.

surely even reddit don't like this nonsense? surely??

Honestly a lot of the trouble with the book seems to be the narrations and descriptions, so maybe. Telling the story through visuals and dialogue over ~2 hours means much less in the way of smarmy fedora rants.

Oldfag here.
To be honest, RPO is a love letter to 80's nostalgia. If you weren't around for the 80's it won't matter.

Terrible fucking book. My friends don't understand why I hate it but also don't take the time to read good SF when I recommend it to them. Fuck Cline and everyone like him.

Reddit DOES like it, user. Every stereotype about Reddit is, to some degree, true. Why do you think we hate them so much?

I dispute this, nostalgia in general and for the 80's in particular has enough presence in modern pop culture that it's become a thing for people who didn't exist back then. Check out some Youtube comments for old music videos to see this.

94 babby here, I'll confess I had a pretty hard "le wrong generation" phase for the 80's and very early 90's myself.

>To be honest, RPO is a love letter to 80's nostalgia.
Explanations aren't excuses and excuses aren't explanations, you queer.

>RPO is a love letter to 80's nostalgia
No it's not. It's wankfest wish-fulfillment for the author.

>That last sentence
This guy is spooked badly. I can't say exactly by what, though.

Legit fell for this meme and read it because of the love it gets on Reddit. Cringiest shit I've ever read. I don't get the love for it.

>Haven't seen it on lit a lot
>admitting to being this new

Glenn Beck unironically likes this book and thinks it's "deep" so you know it is awful. I would call it fan fiction but honestly I think that would be an insult to fan fiction. It's not even really nerdy either, it's pseudo-nerdy, what normalfags think being nerdy is. Both /m/ and /co/ have torn the book a new ass hole with how all of its references are completely wrong.

Did you think everyone on r/atheism was being ironic or something? I was going to university when reddit became big and let me tell you redditors are actually WORSE in real life than they are on reddit.

It's pop literature for young people who don't usually read, so what did you expect?

Fuck you, this was the book they gave to my incoming freshman class at university. This book is meant to make people stupid. It requires an awareness of pop culture from 30 years ago that the average 13-year-old doesn't have, and the ones who get the references wouldn't want to read this piece of shit anyway. This book make you dumb dumb.

I'm honestly curious about the books Veeky Forums was assigned to read for freshman orientation.

>started at Clemson fall 2013
>assigned to read The Iguana Tree, about a Mexican trying to get into the US and bring his family over
>almost certainly assigned because an alumni wrote it
>apparently the class a year later was assigned Machine Man by the Jennifer Government guy, so I was kinda jealous

what is this? you were assigned a book to read for freshman orientation?
is this an American thing or am I just getting meme'd?

It's just like my iseikai animus!

From what I know it's fairly common, no idea if it's near-universal though.

Probably not as common, but I also had to pick a new student seminar (forgot the exact label they used). They were mostly shit like talking about beauty standards or whatever, and I ended up choosing the Community Action Poverty Simulation.

>be assigned the role of a black father with a wife, daughter, and aunt
>the aunt can't drive but wants to keep her car anyway, have to pay for it
>get fired from my job because of something involving the transport token system
>mostly sit at home the rest of the game, once get the tokens to reapply, don't get hired back
>take my money to the pawn shop, buy an illegal gun (buying one legally in-game would require taking a trip to get a registration or something, didn't have the transport tokens)
>go back to my former employer and pull my gun on them
>turns out guns don't do shit, get "arrested" (sit in the corner trying to read my chem 101 book)
>in the meeting after the sim one of the people running it talked with actual concern about someone trying to commit murder in-game
>mfw

desu the worst thing was the beginning-of-the-year welcome group and the fat blonde girl with forced enthusiasm leading it.

desu I kinda want to see him try to write his own Konosuba or something.

hahahaahhahahahahah thats so retarded. I'm very glad I didn't go to college because I'm almost certain I would have killed myself

Things were OK after that, every dumb college story like this I have is about gen eds or some kind of freshman/general campus nonsense.

>"accelerated composition" was some grad student throwing out the words logos ethos pathos or "multimodal composition," honestly I don't remember shit other than butting heads with her a couple times
>chose "Literature in a 20th and 21st Century Context" for my lit gen ed I'm a STEMtard, seemed to involve a lot of talk about zombies which treaded theories you'd get from old Cracked articles (also used a couple Crash Course videos, but even the lecturer said they were obnoxious)
>thought the lecturer was wearing a flowery undershirt at first, turns out she just had a large chest tattoo but otherwise she was one of those 20-30 something women pretending to be a 40-something woman

Yo sound like the kind of person who doesn't have the self confidence to pull off a school shooting.

Reddit here. I love the book, but don't call me Shirley. XD

>we
Nigger you just got here

it's pretty fucking disgusting this guy has a following. before looking at who it was and seeing his GR profile, i knew immediately he didn't read much at all and i thought it was actually something from r/writingprompts because the style is so similar. his gr is filled with starwars coloring books being rated at 5/5 and he listed everything he was forced to read in highschool. absolutely disgusting and it's actually aggravating

i was almost having my mind blown at how this could possibly be popular, and then i realized him and his wife are members of the (((tribe))) and, as always, they do each other favors and promote each others' works within that tribe so you end up with dude's who are 45 years old writing like they're 19 making lots of money just because they control advertisement and they can pull favors for each other so easily

Jew mad, bro?

if someone you're dating recommends this book after finding out you read, how do you respond?

I know you're probably looking for the meme answer, but...

You keep dating her if you like her. Not everyone is going to share all of your same interests at the same level and it's unreasonable to expect them to do so.

>you were assigned a book to read for freshman orientation?
They just gave us all free copies at orientation a couple months before our first semester and told us there'd be a quiz on it when we came in. At one point during the first week freshmen were there, before everyone else moved in, there was some activity where instructors tried to tie the book's themes (sustainability, networking, individualism) into an unstructured discussion. There were no serious consequences if you didn't read it.
Might be an American thing.

it's also not every university. I didn't get a book when we went to orientation but that was like 10 years ago.

throw hot coffee in her face and laugh as i read my greeks

My friend gave it to me, saying it was the best book he's ever read. He's a redditor.
I'm at least trying to get him into Marlon James or PKD or something contemporary but good.