Tag: litrpg

In which this was good and I’m mad

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, ReviewsLeave a comment

I read the first He Who Fights With Monsters book back in May, and I didn’t like it very much. It was far from the worst thing I’d ever read– hell, it wasn’t even the worst thing I read in May— but the main character was more or less unbearable and the writing wasn’t very good. Travis Deverell had the affliction so annoyingly common to the recent burst of indie writers who have gotten their big series trad-pubbed: he had a terrible habit of using words that were close, but not quite, the word he wanted. Mark Twain would have had a field day. I three-starred it, my usual signal for “I finished this book, and that’s really all I have to say about it,” and then …

… ordered the sequel? Because I’m a fucking moron, apparently.

Well, I just finished the God damned thing, and it’s better than the first book to such an extent that I almost want to go back and read the hardcover of the first book– I’m wondering if there was another editing pass between the original epub versions (which is what I read, since it was free) and the new hardcover rereleases. The improvement in the writing is that stark. There’s still the occasional clunky sentence, but I got sent into editor mode within the first couple of pages of the first book and never got out of it, and it never happened in this one– and I also never got the “that’s not the word you wanted” feeling after it was nearly omnipresent in the first book.

(An example of the “that’s not the word you wanted” phenomenon would be if I had used “omniscient” in that last sentence, if you’re wondering what I’m talking about.)

Shit, Jason is even bearable in this one, showing … actual growth as a person, I think? I normally like snarky MCs, but there was something about this guy that just got under my skin, and if you read negative reviews of this series the most common criticism is that the person doing the review couldn’t stand Jason. He’s got a self-awareness about him in this book that simply wasn’t there in the first one, and while I can still see someone being annoyed by him it feels a little less reasonable.

There are thirteen of these fucking things, people. I’m two books away from the end of Wheel of Time and I have the Goddamn Realm of the Underlings to read next year. I want to reread Throne of Glass. I don’t need another maxi-series! No! Bad authors!

Fuuuuuuuuuck.

Monthly Reads: May 2026

On By Luther M. SilerIn Photography, Reading3 Comments

What I’m learning, looking at this, is that I should have written more book reviews this month. Because Canticle, We Burned So Bright and Sailing to Sarantium could all be Book of the Month and I only reviewed one of them.

Two quick book observations

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First, that my suspicion appears to have been correct: I think I’m probably good with reading the rest of the Dungeon Crawler Carl books and then never touching anything that calls itself “LitRPG” ever again. The best thing about Kaiju Battlefield Surgeon is the title, which suggests that the book is going to be delightful. It’s not bad, but it’s not something that, at about the 2/3 mark, is leading me to believe that I’m going to be spending a lot of time with any examples of this genre not written by Matt Dinniman.

The second thing is that, yes, my Kindle is genuinely saving me money, as I’m reading this book for free through Kindle Unlimited and, believe it or not, I don’t think I feel the need to own it. Also, I got to annotate this sentence:

I haven’t used the annotate feature very much, but it might come in pretty handy when I want to be able to find bits of a book to talk about during reviews. Or, y’know, talk about the part in the book where there are worms throwing baby heads at the protagonist. Dungeon Crawler Carl definitely can trend toward raunchy and gross humor– a talking sex doll head is a major secondary character, for crying out loud– but Kaiju is a level beyond.

On Dungeon Crawler Carl

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, ReviewsLeave a comment

Wow, that’s bigger than I thought it was going to be.

Oh well. Scrolling’s free.

I finished the seventh and most recent book in the Dungeon Crawler Carl series last night, staying up too late to do it. The eighth book comes out in June; I pre-ordered it the literal first day it became available to do so. Dinniman has an unrelated book, Operation Bounce House, coming out in February, and I’ve preordered that as well. The series is currently expected to be ten books, and apparently might be eleven.

I don’t think I’ve reviewed any of the books as I’ve read them, and I don’t really intend for this to be a review yet either, as a multi-book review really ought to be for the whole series and even as fast as Dinniman seems to write, we’re at least two or three years away from that. I will say this, though: I started this series mostly out of FOMO, something that y’all know good and well catches me on books all the time. I don’t like not reading good books, even if their premise– aliens invade Earth and a guy and his cat get thrown into an intergalactic competition that somehow mimics the genre tropes of role-playing video games– is completely ridiculous. “LitRPG” is its own entire genre; having read and enjoyed eight books in it, other than reading more of Dinniman’s work in the future I have no plans at all to dip my toe into any other examples of it.

I’ve been reading about a book a month in this series since picking up Dungeon Crawler Carl in May. The first one was at least a little bit against my will; I wasn’t expecting to like what I was reading all that much, but again, FOMO.

I plan to restart the series in December so that I can have read it twice by the time A Parade of Horribles comes out. My wife picked up the first book on a whim a couple of months ago and is currently reading book five, and she’s read them back to back to back to back to back. Which means the same as “back to back” but sounds like more of a feat. This is not a thing she does, guys.

These books have no fucking right to be this good. They’re too ridiculous and too raunchy to be as good as they are. And yet somehow this series is the best new thing I’ve encountered in a long time, and having read four thousand pages of this series this year I am about to start over and do it again.

Plus Bounce House and the first book of another series of his called Kaiju Battlefield Surgeon, because right now Dinniman is tied with BrandoSando for the author I’ve read the most books from in 2025, and I can’t let Sanderson win that contest.

Just do it. Trust me. Put aside your reservations and pick up the first book. The whole series is on Kindle Unlimited if you happen to have Amazon Prime, so you don’t even have to pay for it. Get them from the library. I know, I know, this feels like it has to be dumb as hell. Go give them a shot anyway.