Good Morning Folks. I took yesterday off and while I had planned on writing a blog post.. one never actually happened. Instead you are getting the post that I probably would have written yesterday, a day late. This weekend I finished my consumption of the Dungeon Crawler Carl series… and I have to admit I am a bit sad that it is over. This has quite possibly been the book series that I least expected to get into… and then hungrily consumed as quickly as possible after getting into the first book. I admit the whole LitRPG genre never really appealed to me… why read about playing a game when I could just be playing a game? However it can create a really interesting backdrop to tell a well written tale against, as is evidenced by the fact I just spent thirty six days tearing through this series one after another.
The premise of the series is what if you took Duke Nukem… made him lovable… gave him a talking cat companion that is even more lovable… and tossed them both into a Smash TV style Dungeon Crawl where they have to kill their way to the bottom… or die permanently because the planet has been reclaimed for resources by an external galactic bureaucracy. That is one hell of a run-on sentence, but also is about as close as I can really come to explaining the appeal of this series. What this series has in spades is heart. It has so many well written characters that you fall in love with, and genuinely want to succeed and survive… but also know that the odds are stacked against them in spite of quite a bit of literal plot armor. Princess Donut the Queen Anne Chonk is quite possibly the best sidekick ever crafted, and to call her a sidekick though is a bit of a disservice to how much of the plot revolves around her learning how to “adult”. All of the characters show deep growth over the course of the series, and even ones that you kind of sort of loath when you first encounter them… become beloved friends several books in.
What the book series has in abundance though is meaningful payoffs. There have been so many times that a loose plot thread from book one… turns into some significant event later down the line. The dungeon crawl itself has a deeply rich lore surrounding it, and has clear rules that remain in place for the entire series. There are always several different plot threads going at once, and usually colliding in the major event of the individual book. What is really fun however is looking at the artwork for each of the volumes after having finished the book… because there are always so many different moments that suddenly make perfect sense. Sometimes a book series runs out of juice… but this one only seems to be getting better the longer it runs.
On the 16th I finished up This Inevitable Ruin, and it was probably the most epic of the entire series. Even before reading it… I sort of assumed that would be the case given the plot points that were sure to be involved in this single book. It was effectively the culmination of a major event that had bee discussed in every single book of the series, and the resolution was most definitely worth the wait. Carl is a bit of a fuck up at times… and a pure Agent of Chaos… but he is OUR Agent of Chaos. Donut is occasionally very self centered… as is the case with every cat ever to exist on this planet… but she is OUR precious princess. Like I see in her actions literally hundreds of things that my own Gracie, Mollie, and Josie end up doing every day. I feel about Donut the same way that I am certain dog lovers feel about Oberon in the Kevin Hearne books.
So here is the point where I suggest you listen to the Audiobooks instead of reading them. So much of my enjoyment of this series is I think in large part to how well they are acted out by the amazing Jeff Hays of Soundbooth Theater. I decided the embed this video as an example, because it does not really give anything away or steal from you any revelations from the series. God Dammit Donut is sort of the catch phrase for Carl specifically… but other characters occasionally say it as well in the series. So here is a delightful video of Jeff shifting between 14 characters uttering that phrase, and you can see how wildly different each character feels as result. What is often even more entertaining is the in universe advertisement for Soundbooth Theater at the end of every book. These feel like the mid credit scenes in a Marvel movie, because they often have some sort of payoff for the next book in the series… that just happens to take place out of the flow of the novel itself.
The problem with finishing an amazing series… is that I always end up wanting more of it… now. From what I understand more recently there has been a year lag between volumes of the Dungeon Crawler Carl series, and since this last volume came out in November, it means I am going to have a bit of a wait on my hands. One of the other books that has been advertised throughout the audio books for Dungeon Crawler Carl, is Kaiju: Battlefield Surgeon. I love Kaiju… and I enjoyed the DCC series… and with a preposterous name like that I figured surely I would love it. The weird thing about this book is that it feels like it comes from an earlier era in Matt Dinniman’s career… when he had not quite found his voice, or more so the voice of the Dungeon Crawler Carl series. Technically this was published after the popularity of the DCC series, but I kind of wonder if this was a side project that had been shelved for a bit.
Essentially it is a very graphic bio-horror series about being trapped in a world of giant battling Kaiju and playing the support staff to keep them up and fighting. Have you ever dreamed about having an apartment in the bowel system of a giant monster? Oh yeah… me neither. It is most definitely interesting and I will have zero problem finishing it… but it is also just not really my jam. It makes me also think that maybe LitRPG is not really my genre. All of the game elements did not feel front and center in the Dungeon Crawler Carl series and instead it was more of a character driven tale. This very much feels like a book about a game, and the characters themselves seem paper thin so far. Maybe this will change over time… but so far none of the characters are particularly likeable… whereas I fell in love with Carl and Donut almost immediately. It is wild how much of a difference having POV characters that you care about makes for the reading experience.
If you have yet to be infected by the mind virus that is Dungeon Crawler Carl, I suggest you give it a shot. Matt Dinniman has a fancy new publisher and as a result all of the books are being released with more mass-market friendly covers and artwork. I think they all look pretty cool, but also do not have near the heart… nor the final payoff that the original artwork does. They do however make them look far less like graphic novels… which might have been a turn off for some readers. Whatever form you choose to consume them in… I suggest adding them to your list. Give it at least two books, because it is really in the second book that the series comes into its own. I am hooked and am probably going to be consuming these every single time a new one is released going forward. I will probably seek out another popular LitRPG book just to give the genre another chance… but I am not entirely certain reading about a game is really my jam and that DCC might have simply just been a brilliant outlier.
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Hey Folks! I appear to be on this short book kick right now. One of my goals for this year was to not have this massive gulf where I was not really reading anything. Essentially last year I went through this period from the launch of Dawntrail in the summer through to November where I was not consuming books at all. I am really happier when I am actively reading things, and as such one of my big focuses this year is to get back into the swing of things. After only reading a book or two a year for most of my life I have so much catching up to do and so many excellent series that I have never touched. I have this backlog in my head that I should probably document somewhere, but apparently right now I am going through a cycle of reading a bunch of short books.
Right now I am on this kick of tearing through the Martha Wells Murderbot Diaries series. I had to title this post “I Love Murderbot!” because there is this great quote on the cover of each of the books I have read so far and in truth I fully agree with that sentiment. I deeply relate to Murderbot and their outlook on the world. I really like protecting people… I play tanks in video games… but I also don’t really like being observed by other human beings. I get this is a weird take given that I devote tons of my life to actively blogging… but the secret there is that when I am writing these I am effectively talking to myself. This is my private journal and I am just letting you all read it. Anyways I am not sure how many of these books there are but I can already see that I am pretty much going to burn through all of them in a row. I do this occasionally with series, and that is one of the big benefits of being deeply late to the party.
I’ve also recently read through the first two books of the Sworn Soldier series by T. Kingfisher. The first book What Moves the Dead is essentially this delightful revisiting of Fall of the House of Usher featuring a retired sworn soldier Alex Easton and their assistant Angus. The first book is delightful, the second book What Feasts at Night was enjoyable, but not quite as much so. What Moves the Dead leans heavily on being a retread of a familiar story and gains a lot of ground from that. What I really enjoyed about both books however is the characters… specifically Ms Potter the Mycologist. I am pretty sure that my friend Ace recommended these books to me, but also so did Storygraph so I figured I should probably pay attention. Well worth your time and both are extremely short.
Another book I have finished since the start of the year is the third part of The Divide series from J.S. Dewes called The Relentless Legion. I feel like this book series is a relatively unknown gem. Legitimately I only read this because I was looking for something to check out from the library and this was a new release. Did you like playing Mass Effect as FemShep? Did you enjoy The Expanse or the aging Chris Carter series Space Above and Beyond? Legitimately pick this series up and give it a read because it is extremely good. The third book mostly wrapped everything up neatly, while leaving enough room to potentially have follow up books that expand this beyond a trilogy. It was a satisfying end, but also there are still a bunch more questions because there are longer tailed events that will eventually have to be dealt with.
I don’t always do a great job of sharing the books that I am reading on this blog. If you are so inclined and have an existing Fediverse/Mastodon/Pixelfed account you can follow my progress via my Bookwyrm account. Occasionally I give my thoughts about a book when I update my statuses in that application. I am also keeping Storygraph up to date mostly because I like its recommendation system. So if you are using that system already you can also follow my progress there. I am going to make an attempt to start logging recommendations in the “To Read” section of Storygraph because I have been bad about actually keeping track of that, and I don’t really love the Bookwyrm implementation.
All in all though the year is off to a good start book wise. Have you been reading anything good? Drop me a line below and I will pilfer your suggestions.
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Good Morning Folks! I’ve not done as much navel gazing as I usually do around this time of the year. Normally I do these posts over the holiday break as filler to keep my blog active. This year however I just took most of that time off from blogging entirely. I think it was good for me to finally take a proper break. However this also means that you are probably going to get a spate of navel gazing posts now in January. During late 2022 and all of 2023 I was on a tear of consuming way more books than I have previously. Generally speaking in a given year I would normally read one or two books, but in 2023 I set a goal of 20 and made it through 52. As such I set the ambitious goal of 50 for 2024… and fell extremely short of it. Essentially I made it through 39 “books” though several of those were short stories and a few graphic novels.
I still use Bookwyrm as my primary platform for keeping track of my reading, and when I logged in I was presented with my summary of 2024. If you are curious you can also still see 2023 for reference, and weirdly I did not read that many fewer pages this year. Part of this was of course that I dove much deeper into the world of Brandon Sanderson and his epic over-thousand-page tomes. What kept me from my goal is the fact that I essentially hit a gulf mid-year where I just stopped reading altogether until the tail end of the year. Had I kept up a consistent clip, there is no doubt I would have burned through those 50 books that I set as my goal for the year. For 2025 however, I set myself a bit more realistic goal and landed on 30.
Another tool that I started using more reliably was Storygraph. This was a suggestion from my friend Cuppy some time ago as a Goodreads alternative, and more than anything the feature that I like the most is its recommendation engine. While Bookwyrm is my primary tool, I am keeping Storygraph updated as well and then using their algorithm when I get stuck for something new to read. I don’t use any of these apps on my phone, but instead prefer the web application experience. My wife however has shifted to using Storygraph entirely and uses the app reliably to keep track of her own reading. Sometimes its suggestions are painfully obvious, but occasionally it chooses something that would not have normally piqued my interests.
For example a few of my favorite short books last year came from storygraph. I would say honestly that The Lost Girls was quite possibly my favorite book of the year, and I would not have been tipped off to it were it not for randomly searching its generated suggestions. It is so painfully “90s goth culture” and well worth the read and has a sort of Vampires meets Heathers vibe to it. Where Darkness Blooms is quite honestly not that dissimilar from a book I read in 2023 called Dark Harvest, but it still takes an interesting spin on the “small town has a dark secret” trope. It wasn’t necessarily the most amazing or original book I have ever read but it sure was a fun little read and I would recommend it to anyone just looking for something quick.
Another thing that I am proud of from last year is that I made my way through the entire Dark Tower series back to back at the beginning of the year. This is something I had always wanted to do, but struggled to get hooked into. I am not necessarily the biggest Stephen King fan, but now having finished this series I understand a bit more of the unvarnished admiration of this sequence. I think my favorite bit of this series is the language of the characters… specifically Roland. I admit I have said “thankee sai” more than a few times over the past year. Admittedly… now that I am indoctrinated into the shared universe of the Dark Tower, I have a not so insignificant desire to go back and read some of the other King books that are connected to it as well. If you believe the fans… essentially EVERYTHING King has ever written is connected to this one universe.
As far as 2025… I am off to a decent start so far. I just finished the two books in the Cerulean Sea series by TJ Klune and will absolutely read the next one whenever it comes out. These are very much “Wizarding World” but unapologetically queer. In fact the afterword of the second book essentially says as much and that their goal is to write queer stories that embrace everyone. Really well written. I think I like the first book a bit better than the second book, but mostly because the second takes a bit to get rolling and is a very different sort of tale. Essentially all of the books from this author are soft adds to my long list of “I should probably read this at some point”.
I’m not really sure where I am going from here. I did not start something new last night after finishing Somewhere Beyond the Sea. I checked into a few things but they were not available through any of my now four library cards. I’ve been hesitant to dive into another Sanderson epic, because I know those are such massive commitments. I want to read What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher so I might try and find a copy of that somewhere. I also want to dive into the Feed series by Seanan McGuire writing as Mira Grant, so that might be a thing I do. I’ve also read zero of the Murderbot books so that is a possibility as well. Maybe today I will decide where I am heading next so that I can go there tonight.`
The post Failed Goals: The Books of 2024 appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Folks… I have completely fallen off the wagon this year when it comes to books. I finished Apostles of Mercy in August and then just have not kept up with things. It really fell apart during my lead-up to Dawntrail in Final Fantasy XIV since my chosen vehicle for consuming books is playing an audiobook in the background while I grind away at an ARPG or similarly narratively vacant game. Playing anything with a lot of focused stories completely destroys my ability to listen to anything else of substance. Since I am back in Path of Exile for a bit, I really need to get plugged back in and consume literature again. I think my methodology of essentially chainsmoking Sanderson where I lit the next book off the dying embers of the previous, took a lot out of me. I would like to hit that goal of 50 books for the year, which means I need to get through 12 more books before 2025. I kind of doubt that is going to happen.
As far as Atlas progress goes in Path of Exile, I am up to 70 of 115 and have plenty of uncompleted maps to keep churning forward. I’ve still made almost zero progress on any further gearing goals, but am realizing that… honestly I don’t need it. This baseline version of the Righteous Fire Chieftain can absolutely complete the atlas and probably get my first two keystones without much issue. Given this is a limited event, in spirit if not necessarily in time constraints… means I am probably okay if I never get past the “starter” build. Optimization and climbing the ladder is really for a proper fresh league.
I specced out my second Atlas tree for Niko, Scarabs, Shrines, and Strongboxes and it also seems to have the side effect of producing a lot more raw map drops than my very focused Einhar, Beyond, and Ritual build did. I will probably run this for awhile alternating between mapping and delving until I finish out my atlas. Then once I have gotten through the t16 maps I will shift back over to the Einhar/Ritual build in a further attempt to farm one of the two things that can get me an easy Six-Link. I am fine operating in this Semi-SSF mode where I am mostly getting my own stuff. I am however selling a lot of things through the currency exchange to build up a stockpile of currency for when I decide I care about some of the upgrades.
Hoping this weekend to get back engaged in a book and go back to that normal mode of ARPG plus Audiobook. I am not entirely certain what path I am going to go down. I did pick up a copy of Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment, and I would like to make my way through that at some point. I am just not usually one for non-fiction so we will see how well that works. I also have a Cyberpunk 2077 novelization in my back pocket for when I want something that is not too bogged down. Then again I could dive into the next book in the Stormlight Archive series, but I also know that is going to be a major commitment timewise because once I start I am going to burn through it until I complete it.
Anyways. I hope you all have a delightful weekend. I will let you know Monday if I actually accomplished any of the things I hope to going into my weekend.
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