DNF after the first chapter. Here’s why:
Strike one: the book is aggressively atheistic. I’m fine with reading a book by an atheist or with an atheist’s general world view, but when the book explicitly states that there is no God and all religions are false, and beats you over the head with that message multiple times in the first chapter, sorry but I check out. I don’t like it when Christian books beat me over the head with a Christian message either, and I’m a Christian. Preachiness is still preachiness, no matter the message, and it gets a hard strike from me.
Strike two: The world is not only bleak, it’s unimaginatively bleak. Climate change, energy crisis, endless wars—it’s pretty clear that the author just took all of our present problems and assumed (1) the hysteria surrounding those problems is all totally justified, and (2) we aren’t going to find any solution to these problems in the next 20-30 years. Except for some of them, like the energy crisis, we already have found solutions and started implementing them—in fact, we did that some time ago.
(As a side note, when the rich billionaire OASIS founder announces his golden ticket contest, the video shows him walking through a vault with a stack of gold bars as high as a house. What the author of this book apparently doesn’t know is that the entire world’s gold reserves could fit in an Olympic-sized swimming pool, which places the value of the gold in that vault in the tens of trillions of dollars, not the hundreds of billions as the book states. And that’s only at today’s artificially suppressed prices, before the Great Reset. That’s not a reason why I DNFed this book, but it does show laziness in the worldbuilding—hence, why it was so unimaginatively bleak.)
Strike three (and this was mostly just a matter of personal taste): the 80s nostalgia was over the top. I know this is a reason why many people loved this book, but for me, it just didn’t click. I was born in the mid-80s, and most of the pop culture references went completely over my head. This all 80s, all the 80s, and nothing but the 80s approach might have resonated more with me if I’d been born 10 years earlier, but I wasn’t, and it didn’t.
Skipped to the last chapter and didn’t find any compelling reason to go back and try again. Apparently there’s a sappy love story (because of course there is), and the solutions to the world’s problems are just as unimaginative as the problems themselves. Two stars because the book wasn’t terrible, just not the kind of book I enjoy.