But when the Dungeon Crawler Carl series became ubiquitous this summer, I thought, nah, not for me. No way would I, a person who has never played Dungeons & Dragons and hasn't touched a non-Mario Kart video game since grade school, possibly enjoy these books. I didn't even know what LitRPG meant. It sounded like a new club drug.
But...One way to talk yourself into reading the book du jour when you're not sure you'll like it but want to read for cultural literacy's sake is to plan to write about it. Motivation!
So I recruited my bookseller colleague Adi Alsaid to do a Critics in Conversation piece with me at the Chicago Review of Books. In the piece, we discuss how we -- both of us primarily literary fiction readers -- talked ourselves into reading this book that's far outside both our comfort zones, Adi's experience with the audiobook, and whether Dungeon Crawler Carl is the beginning of a LitRPG trend.
You can read that conversation by clicking this button.
But here's the spoiler: Yes, Dungeon Crawler Carl actually IS a good time. It's really goofy and a lot silly, but it moves as quickly as a book like this must. It is literally like reading a video game. I will say, even through about the first 200 pages, I still wasn't sure what the hype was about and WAS sure this wasn't for me. But by the second half of this first novel in a planned 10-novel series, the actual plot starts to take shape (as opposed to the somewhat repetitiveness of fighting monsters and collecting prizes and learning about the rules), the stakes are raised (beyond just dude and his talking cat need to survive), and I got swept up in the story.
So yes, to distill it to its essence, Dungeon Crawler Carl is just a lot of fun. A sugary and geeky piece of brain candy. And no, there's absolutely nothing wrong with that.
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