There's an abandoned copy of Ready Player One at work. Is it worth pinching?

[Senior Baiano]

I was beating them up with a shitty stick mate

[Mr Trumpet]

I managed to misread Ready Player One as a satire of the end of culture.

There's a horrible dystopian world well into climate collapse and culture has stopped. There's nothing new and everyone just spends their time looking backwards in a haze of nostalgia because the present is so awful.

I thought the book was really clever right up to the point I realized it's not a satire, it's aspirational.

I had this as well. The protagonist was an idiot, but that was fine because he was a socially awkward teenager. Then I heard the author's porn poem and I realised i'd hugely overestimated him.

[Famous Mortimer]

I had the same experience with the poster above about the Stieg Larsson books, I think in the first book of a series you can get away with introducing a new world or dynamic in place of telling a story. Every woman in book 1 wants to fuck the author surrogate hero which is a bit grating, when you have it again in book 2 and one of the same married women has to keep seeing him to be sexually satisfied it's farcical. And the major plot is just worse in book 2.

I got through book 2 on the accumulated goodwill from book 1, but the third is unbearable.

[Das Reboot]

Pretty sure this was posted on here around the time the film came out, but worth seeing again.