Colin Gooding

This is a really insightful and well written account of a heartbreaking relationship. With the title of this book (which is a great title), I was expecting the entire thing to be just a scathing indictment of her mother, but its a lot more complicated than that.

The book is written in such a way that her mother's pattern of abuse and manipulation is obvious, but from Jennette McCurdy's perspective at the time when believing in her mother and making her happy was important to her (and still is to this day, to some extent). This was really revealing and deeply affected me, as McCurdy walks through key moments in her life and I had to try to understand how her mother could possibly behave in the way that she does and sympathize with McCurdy's inability to do anything about it.

I'm not necessarily a big memoir reader, but sometimes when I read them they are a bit scattershot, covering a lot of different areas of a person's life with varying degrees of interest. This book is a lot more laser focused on its thesis as described by its title, and I find that to be a lot more engaging.

This one started off very promising to me, and kind of fizzled out a bit further into it. I really like the structure of this book, it's a series of short stories told as vignettes from different characters, but all within the same world and timeline. (It's also a pandemic story, although a fantastical one, but that might be off-putting to some).

There are a few stories near the beginning that were incredibly engrossing. I'll try to keep it vague and it will sound silly, but one is about a euthanasia theme park and another is about a talking pig. These are complete stories, well told, and are actually quite heartwrenching.

I think I may try rereading this at some point, I listened to the audiobook and it's possible I just wasn't in the mindset to pay property attention to the latter parts of the book, but they just didn't hold my attention as much and by the end I was a bit unsatisfied. Still worth reading for the high points though.

I really loved Ready Player One. I know it gets a lot of criticism for just being a string of references, but I thought it nailed exactly what it was going for, it was fun, indulgent nostalgia wish fulfillment. I had varying levels of familiarity with the different references, but even the ones I had no attachment too were engaging because of the enthusiasm put into it.

When this sequel came out, I heard a lot of similar criticisms of the poor reference-heavy writing that I dismissed and queued this up to read soon. But then I saw people who liked the first book being pretty critical of this one as well so I decided to push it off... but then recently the audiobook became available through the library's Skip The Line program despite being reserved for several months, and I was between audiobooks, so I jumped on it.

** Spoilers **

Ready Player Two is not very fun. The main character isn't fun to be with, he's kind of a shitty person at a shitty place in his life and not happy about it. In the first book, he gleefully undertakes his quest and is a super fan of everything he experiences, in this one he barely knows anything about what he's doing and is just forced to do it quickly by the bad guy. I'm even more familiar with the references in this book than the last and yet they were far less fun.

The way this book tries to both bring up social and moral issues of the technology it uses, while also refusing to have any consequences of it for the characters is absolutely insane to me. The entire plot is about how a rogue AI based off of a real person neatly kills billions of people, but the conclusion at the end is that it was just a one-off occurrence and actually AI memory people are actually super neat? The main character spies on people without their knowledge, copies people's entire consciousnesses into these AI things without their knowledge, and at worst he gets a scolding from his girlfriend about that, who eventually comes around to it anyway because she has her grandma back digitally now. But at least the main character learned enough to not use this technology anymore, even though he continues to profit off billions of people still using it and also maintains direct communication with the AI created by it.

I don't think it's all bad, there's still some enjoyable moments that reminded me of what it felt to read the first book. I was probably wavering between a two and a three star rating while reading most of it. The ending definitely cemented it on the lower end that I was leaning to anyways.

I still think the first book probably holds up, as I outlined some of the differences above, but reading this makes me worried that I would have a lot of problems with it if I were to read it again today. Maybe I'll give it a shot sometime.

This is an extremely well written and poignant story about a tough subject. This is a great book club pick, there will be a lot to discuss both technically and societally. This was the first Wagamese novel I've ever read, and definitely will not be the last.

** Minor spoilers for the structure of the story to follow **

I always find it fascinating when the conclusion of a book can recontextualize the entire story, especially when it's not a big mystery solved and the story already worked as it was. The middle section of this book, while certainly still a well told tale, felt slight and seemed like an odd story for Wagamese to tell, but by the time the book was over the realization of why it was told that way was very impactful.

From a technical perspective, the prose is really free-flowing and easy to read, and I love how it's divided into very short chapters, often 2-3 minutes long only. I was able to tear through this book and it always kept me wanting to just read over more chapter before putting it down.