Ready Player Two by Ernest Cline

Ready Player One was a near perfect book for me. Ready Player Two, not so much. Ready Player One was filled with all the nerdy nonsense that I loved when I was growing up. It was set in a world much like our own,  but a few years down the road. The tech that made the books’ virtual reality work, was not that far off from the tech of today. Virtual Reality has been popular in science fiction for some time. The real world stuff, the MetaVerse type stuff, has never lived up to the worlds imagined in stories like…

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HBO’s Girls

Girls is the story of a bunch of 20 something lowlifes living in New York and fucking anything that moves.  Since the show is only thirty minutes long these isn’t a lot of room for silly things like character development or motivation.  Our mostly struggling lot met someone, have sex with them, and than wonder-hmm, who was that, anyway? when they wake up somewhere strange. These are all unlikeable people doing unlikable things-but that hasn’t stopped Two and Half Men from running for a zillion years.  The difference with Girls is that it wants to be the Art House stupid…

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Cemetery Junction

The story of a group of desperate young Brits who want more out of life than their parents got.  We follow around three losers in their early twenties who still enjoying getting drunk, starting fights, and painting obscene graffiti.  One of the young hoods decides that he doesn’t want to work in The Factory, but wants to make something of himself.  So he becomes a door to door salesman. Cemetery Junction is set in 1973. There is still open racism, women are ment to stay at home and fetch things for their men, and men are meant to work until…

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The Tortilla Curtain by T. Coraghessan Boyle

Torture your protagonist. It’s not enough for him to be stuck up a tree. You must throw rocks at him while he figures out how to get down. ~Allen Guthrie The Tortilla Curtain would make a great Coen Brothers movie.  There are a number of put upon people doing their best to get by in a world that doesn’t understand them or even want them in it.  It is A Tale of Two Cities set in L.A. and follows the adventures of two men who live in very different worlds only a few miles away from each other. The Tortilla…

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How Starbucks Saved My Life

I found this odd little book of a rich man who loses everything and ends up working at a Starbucks kind of fun.  Who doesn’t like a My How The Mighty Have Fallen story?  In this case it’s an evil Madison Avenue Ad Man who was handed a job by a friend of a friend after his graduation from an Ivy League College.  After forty years of living the good life, driving fancy cars, rubbing elbows with the rich and famous, wearing two thousand dollar suits-he is fired from his high roller job. At first he isn’t too worried.  But…

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