Bookwi.se

Summary: Aliens destroy the Earth and put millions of people who managed to survive into a live action role playing game where they have to survive lots of monsters (and some people) trying to kill them. 

I have known about Dungeon Crawler Carl for about a year. It started showing up in recommendations for great audiobooks and what to read if you like Project Hail Mary or the Murderbot series. I have been reading a lot of fiction lately, in part because my paying job has been so busy that I have not had the brain power for other types of books. I finally decided to pick them up when a good friend and his wife said they were listening to them as an audiobook on a long drive.

Dungeon Crawler Carl knows it is not great and important literature. It is funny, crass, way too violent, but engaging. At this point I am in the middle of the third book in a bit over a week. The kindle books are in the Kindle unlimited library so I have borrowed them and then had the kindle discount to get the audiobook for under $5 each.

This is a book describing a live action role playing game. It is inspired by first person shooters and Dungeons and Dragons and the wide variety of other games. In some ways I think this is like a more adult oriented version of Ready Player One, except Ready Player One was an immersive video game who was on a quest to solve problems using cultural history. Dungeon Crawler Carl is supposed to be more D&D inspired fantasy where the “real” person dies and there is (from my perspective) entirely too much description of blood and guts from the fights.

The writing style is self consciously insider jokey that understands the ridiculousness of the premise. I think that is similar to the Ready Player One style of writing without the love of 80s and 90s culture. There was a lot of complaints about the constant references of music, movies and video games from the 80s and 90s in Ready Player One, but that isn’t here. There is references to mythology and D&D and alien movies, but it is much more moderate and not oriented toward the nerd level knowledge.

I think a lot of people will like the series but there is genuine content warning. The audiobooks are very well done, but the writing style of the book has lots of examples of the characters texting back in forth because the live action role playing game is a galaxy wide TV shows with trillions of people watching. So lots of communication says one thing out loud and another thing is texted. That is signified using audio distortions in the audiobook, but it is easier to follow that in text. Generally, I don’t love sound effect or music in audiobooks, but here it is important to give context to what is going on. But I also am not listening to this if anyone else is in the room without using headphones. The swearing isn’t too extreme, but it is consistent. The descriptions of the violence and gore is mostly what is what I don’t love. There is sexual innuendo, but as of the middle of the third book right now, there hasn’t ben any actual sex. There is A LOT of death. Much of it is abstract. Billions of people on earth die in the opening pages of the book. The game starts with about 10 million characters and by the end of the first book, about 90% of those have died. But they are not all abstract. Characters that are known die.

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Summary: Ten years after five chosen teens work together to defeat a magical enemy, they come back together to face a new enemy.

A last year, I stumbled on When Among Crows by Veronica Roth and then I read the second of that series To Clutch a Razor. I had not read any of Roth’s books in a decade, but she has been writing, so I decided I would pick up some of her books when I ran across them on sale.

The Chosen Ones has a premise that I was interested in. A group of “chosen ones” was found as early teens after magic started happening and an enemy arose. That story is the backstory to this book but flashbacks do tell us part of that story.

This book is about those heroes as the most famous people on earth and how they have adapted to that, or not. The story primarily focuses on Sloane. She is dating Matt, the team’s leader, but she has not recovered from the trauma of that original fight. It is this part of the book that I liked the most. I wanted to understand what it was like to grapple with regret for what you had done, while the world treats you as a hero. I didn’t really want the book to only stay there, but that was where I liked the book most.

I am not going to spoil the story, but I can understand why a number of people didn’t like the book, or at least thought it was mediocre. The story was a little slow and it meandered around a bit. I liked the book and I have appreciated the grappling with the emotional and other costs of being a hero. It felt to me like While the World Watched, which was the memoir of the last girl to leave the bathroom before the bomb went off that killed the four girls in the 16th Street Church bombing in Birmingham in 1963. She grappled with the cost that she and those around her paid for participating in the civil rights movement. Her brother clearly had PTSD and died young. She grappled with alcoholism and nearly divorced before moving back to Birmingham and working with the museum before she retired.

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Summary: A retelling of part of the Arthurian legends in verse.

I have known of Malcolm Guite for quite a while, but I do not tend to read a lot of poetry and have not previously read any of his books. I have listened to a number of interviews on various podcasts. Guite is a priest, poet, and public intellectual. Galahad and the Grail pulls together all three.

I thought I had read TH White’s Once and Future King when I was a teen, but after reading Galahad and the Grail, I think I have only seen the Sorcerer and the Stone and other movie and TV adaptations. So while I had a rough idea of the characters, most of the story that Guite is adapting and putting to verse was new to me. I did not know anything about who Galahad was or how he was conceived.

It is obvious that Guite is using his skill as a poet to put this story to verse. But he is also thinking theologically about how imagination shapes our formation as humans. I am a bit resistant to the role of Christendom in this story. Arthur and others are clearly Christians working to culturally shape England into a Christ-following country. But the point here isn’t that this is history, or an example of England being particularly chosen by God for a particular purpose of colonialism or power, but that this is a story about how myth and imagination shape shared identity.

I picked up Galahad and the Grail not long after I finished Wilson’s version of the Odyssey. Both were written in verse and I read each of them a bit in verse to understand the structure, but then I mostly listened to them as audiobooks. My perception is that narrative verse was meant to be heard. And while I want to read enough to become familiar with the structure, I want to hear it because narrative verse is an aural medium.

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Summary: The moon inexplicably turns to cheese one afternoon. There is fallout. 

I really like John Scalzi’s writing. He has serious scifi which I enjoy. But I mostly enjoy his humorous stuff that tends to be great on audiobook when I have a long day of mindless database work. I listened to this over the course of two days almost non-stop.

When the Moon Hits Your Eye is a ridiculous concept. One day, the moon turns to cheese. The reason is never discovered. Scalzi takes a silly idea and runs with it. Each chapter is one day. Mostly focused on different characters who mostly do not come back up in the rest of the book. (But some do.)

I don’t think method this would work for a lot of books. There isn’t enough character development or the plot becomes too convoluted to pull so many characters together. But it works here. The potential apocalypse that can come about because of the turning to cheese has lots of threads to work on.

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Summary: A biographer works to solve a mystery.

Every month Amazon gives away a handful of new releases to drum up reviews and interest. I don’t always look, but it can be worth checking out. The Oxford Detective Society was a free book in July 2026 with a formal release date of August 1, 2026.

The Oxford Detective Society is primarily about Lyssa Moore. An Oxford trained writer who occasionally accepts writing commissions or ghostwriting jobs. She is also a relatively recent widow still grieving the death of her young husband from an undiagnosed congenital heart defect.

The current job is to write a biography about a young aristocrat who helped fund and guide a 60s pop group toward stardom. She and the lead singer were a couple, but things started falling apart when first he died of an apparent drug overdose and she died not too long after in what appeared to be an accidental drowning in her garden pond.

This is a very straightforward mystery that is clearly the set up of a series. The society is about the group of friends in her building that seem to all hang out quite a bit. But there was not a significant involvement from them in solving the mystery. The characters were mostly likable and the action reasonable. I would have like a bit more depth to the story. There were a few red herrings, but the actual solution was fairly predictable.

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Summary: The classic story translated by Emily Wilson, narrated by Claire Danes.

I have been preparing to go see Nolan’s version of the Odyssey for the past several weeks. First I read Stephen Fry’s retelling and then I mostly listened but also read a bit of Emily Wilson’s translation narrated by Claire Danes. I have listened to her narrate The Handmaid’s Tale and she has a fairly flat reading style that works for some kinds of fiction but not others. I think it works here.

Wilson translated The Odyssey into verse. Not all version do, some are prose. Generally I think that narrative verse should be listened to. I think that is the case in my favorite verse book, Brown Girl Dreaming. and it is the case with Malcom Guite’s Galahad and the Grail, which I am also reading right now. I tend to get both kindle and audiobook editions because I want to get a sense of the written version of the verse. So I do read about 10 percent of the book. But I mostly listen because these are intended to be heard.

I am not going to get into arguments about the quality of Wilson’s verse or whether Nolan’s version was a good adaptation. I am just not qualified for either of those arguments. Wilson fit the story into verse, there were artistic choices there and some content was shaved to make it fit into verse. Nolan was also adapting a story that has many versions to the screen and also made artistic and stylistic choices. Personally I think it is an artistic masterpiece that also had real misses in some of the choices. Visually I think it was very interesting. I liked the twin themes of grief about war and the concern about how his actions in war led to the larger rejection of “Zeus’ Law” and while I understand how that adapts the original story, I think it makes sense of a modern adaptation. At the same time, I thought Matt Damon’s performance was a bit too flat. And that I wanted the ethics to be a bit more foreign to our modern sensibilities. Not in a way that horrifies us, but rather in a way that shows the ancients as alien to our thinking.

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Summary: A retelling of Odyssey.

We are preparing to watch The Odyssey. We wanted to watch on IMAX and when we were buying tickets the best option was more than two weeks away. I am pretty sure I have never read a straight translation of The Odyssey, but I have read or seen a ton of adaptations. Some of those adaptations are pretty straightforward like O Brother Where Art Thou? and Sea of Monsters by Rick Riordan .

I have also read books “based-on” the Odyssey like Circe by Madeline Miller. But there are those that I didn’t identify as being inspired by the Odyssey, but I have found since that they were, like Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmin Ward and Cold Mountain by Charles Martin. But I think probably more common is the number of books that uses references to the Odyssey, like Daughter of Rage and Ruin by K. B. Hoyle. That book is a retelling of Jack and the Beanstalk, but she still references Cyclops as another famous giant as part of the quest. Many of Hoyle’s books are based on quests and so almost all of them in some way reference The Odyssey.

While Fry’s Odyssey isn’t a translation, it is a pretty straightforward retelling, with a few asides, some explanations built into the main text, and some humor. If you have previously read The Odyssey and want a better refresher than wikipedia, this might be right for you. I know Stephen Fry from his audiobook narration of Harry Potter and other books. And it was on sale on Audible so I picked it up because I was not sure I could get through the original before I saw the movie.

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