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.

I also think there are conceptual problems. Carl wakes up in the middle of the night and goes outside because his girlfriend’s cat escapes out of the house. It is about 2:30 AM and everyone who is inside a building is killed instantly. So if it is 2:30 AM in the US, then it will be the middle of the day in much of Russia or the UAE or India. So many more people should be alive from Asia but that isn’t reflected in the book. This is a book, but it is a real conceptual problem created by the author not thinking through his set up.

The 8th book in the series was released in March 2026. And according to an interview earlier this year, the author plans to conclude the series with the 9th book. This was originally self published, but Ace picket up the rights in 2024. The series has been optioned by Peacock for a tv seres. The audiobooks are an audible exclusive and the main narrator has given unique voices to over 200 characters, it is an impressive range of voices and accents that do not sound like a single person and it is part of why so many have embraced the series. According to the series wikipedia page, the audiobook sales have surpassed the print or ebook sales, which is unusual.

At this point i don’t know if I will do a post on every book or not. My problem with writing about series fiction is that inevitably spoilers have to be discussed.

Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman Purchase Links: Paperback, Kindle Edition, Audible.com Audiobook

I can’t remember if it was when I was reading about Chosen Ones or in Chosen Ones or something else entirely, but I saw a recommendation for Invincible and found a copy at my library. The version I read was probably 300 pages and had a real ending. But clearly it is just the start of these comics.

There is very clear spoofing of the DC world. Superman, Green Lantern, Batman, Flash, etc all have there versions here. I know there is an Amazon produce TV show about this, but I have not seen that. I am no comic book expert. I read two or three graphic novels/comic series a year at most. And I never was into the deep lore.

But the last Superman novel I read was similar in theme to the large storyline which I won’t give away. I am not blown away by this, but I do think it is worth reading another couple hundred pages if I can get it from my library.

Invincible: The Ultimate Connection Vol 1 Kindle Edition (I am linking to the Compendium 1, which as vol 1-43. I got a library hardcover which has vol 1-13.)

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.

The Chosen Ones is obviously fantasy, but I do think as fiction it does try to grapple with the ways that there is often a cost to doing good that we don’t grapple with in advance. Mostly because we are not making choices in advance to do good, but merely responding to an immediate need. There is a twist in Project Hail Mary about Grace’s courage or lack of it and the way that he redeems himself because he has someone that he really loves that drives him to be courageous. There is an overlapping but different story here that I think complements that one. Project Hail Mary is a very optimistic story, which is part of why people like it. Chosen Ones is a far less optimistic story, which I think is part of why people like it less. But I think both are stories that need to be told.

Mental health and trauma are important and I am glad that fiction is picking up on that more over the past couple of decades. There is issues with turning real categories of psychology into “pop” usage and culturally adapting it in ways that are unhelpful. (I haven’t read it yet, but Resisting Therapy Culture: The Dangers of Pop Psychology and How the Church Can Respond by Matthew Loftus is about this.)

This is an adult oriented book in the sense that there is language and violence and trauma and some off screen sex, but most in the sense that it is about emotional and psychologically adult issues. The book is about now adults who were once early teens who were “chosen ones.” The Divergent/Harry Potter/Hunger Games characters didn’t stay teens. They grew up. And when they grew up, they likely would have had to grapple with their lost childhood and what they had to do. This is one version of that story.

The Chosen Ones by Veronica Roth Purchase Links: Paperback, Kindle Edition, Audible.com Audiobook

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.

Because it is verse, it is shorter than you might assume. It is nearly 400 pages on the page, but less than 8 hours of audio. As I understand it, this is the first of a trilogy with the second book coming out in November.  The second book is about Merlin calling Arthur, which is significantly different from this book that is nearly at the end of the Arthurian era.

I think this is a book, and series, that I probably will need to read again (at least once) to fully understand. There is more here, both in the poetry and in the story, than what I am going to catch on the first run.

Galahad and the Grail by Malcolm Guite Purchase Links: Hardcover, Kindle Edition, Audible.com Audiobook

I have read Robert Jones’ previous books. There is a clear progressions. He was the head of a polling company when he wrote The End of White Christian America. That book is mostly about the demographic trends in the US. His next book was White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity. That one was still primarily using polling and demographics but drew on more history to contextualize how a belief in white racial superiority was a long term trend in the US that was explicitly tied to some forms of Christian theology. His third book, The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy: And the Path to a Shared American Future, leaned even more into history and more than the previous two books paid attention to how Native American mistreatment and not just anti-black racism was an important reality that needs to be paid attention to.

This fourth book again slightly shifts the focus while still remaining part of the larger trend, this time focusing on how there is a movement against democracy and toward authoritarian control. I think the initial opening of the book that discusses Martin Niemöller the German pastor most well known for his poem, First They Came For. Jones specifcally talks about the different between Niemöller and Bonhoeffer because often Bonhoeffer is pointed to as a hero while Niemöller is not. Jones thinks most of us are more like Niemöller than we are comfortable with. Niemöller initially supported the Nazi party, but then changed his mind and worked against the Nazis. Niemöller lived through WWII, spending six years in a concentration camp. And then in the years after he dedicated his life toward ecumenical work that was focused on peace and Holocaust remembrance. I think that point, which comes back to the fore several times is largely right.

One of the problems of talking about these trends with people who are reluctant to pay attention is that the sources matter. For instance in a section where Jones is talking about President Trump talking about his admiration of Hitler, he cites Generals Kelly and Milley, the president’s Chief of Staff and Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff during the first administration. And he cites General Mattis, Secretary of Defense under Trump, as saying that Trump is a direct threat to democracy. These are not liberals or democrats, but people who served directly under Trump as political appointees of Trump.

Jones does retread some ground from previous books in laying the groundwork for his argument. For instance, his polling and social science research reported in White Too Long suggests that White Christians are more likely than White non-Christians to support xenophobic, anti immigrant and anti-Black policies or attitudes like great replacement theory. But if you have read those previous books I think that Jones does a good job of not rehashing other books, but only giving enough context that those who have not read them can follow the argument while those who have read his previous books will not feel like it is unnecessary repetition.

One of the strengths of Jones writing is that this is not just theoretical discussion, a large part of what he is trying to do is model how repentance and recognition of history matters. He discusses a family bible that has been passed down to him four generations. And whose original owners owned multiple slaves, which represented approximately 75 percent of the value of his estate when he died. He doesn’t leave that discussion to just personal and individual understanding (although personal and individual are important). He also ties that discussion to the founding of the Southern Baptist denomination (his denomination of origin) and how he did not know of the origins of the SBC until he was in college. While this is in the book, this isn’t just theory. The current president of the SBC tweeted a picture of himself recently holding the original founding documents of the SBC. That prompted some controversy because a prominent Black Southern Baptist pastor called it a “Blood Document” and then “The Center for Baptist Leadership” led by William Wolfe, someone that openly advocates for Christian Nationalism, suggested that those who don’t support the reasons for the original founding should leave the denomination. And others who commented underneath openly supported white supremacy and the created good of slavery. That may be an extreme case, but it does show that even when some suggest that Jones is making too strong of an argument, you can find examples of people who will prove his point if not make that point even more strongly.

There was not a lot here that I thought was truly new to me. I am familiar with the history. I knew quite a bit about Juneteenth and Columbus day and I have done similar work to understand my family of origin’s relationship to slavery and stealing Native American land. I think this is important work that needs to be highlighted and worked through. I think Jones is a good author and has the background to be a good author.

But on the negative side, I think that this is a book that is largely going to be preaching to the choir. There is a role for that, but it isn’t going to be changing a lot of minds, but rather informing people who largely agree with him already. I finished this book in about three days. I was engaged. I thought the book was well worth reading. (I listened to an advanced copy of the audiobook from Netgalley). And I will keep picking up Robert Jones’ books because they keep being worth reading.

Backslide: Reclaiming a Faith and a Nation After the Christian Turn Against Democracy by Robert P. Jones Purchase Links: Hardcover, Kindle Edition, Audible.com Audiobook

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.

When The Moon Hits Your Eye is mostly scifi humor. But there are serious parts. There are threads about conspiracy theories. Economics and the global trade and banking systems falling apart is taken seriously. Individuals have to grapple with marriage and love and vocation and what it would be like to face the end of the world. There is a chapter mostly about what this would mean to people of faith. And a chapter about how we know things would be called into question when something that doesn’t seem to be possible seems to happen. But also there are lots of chapters about how people just keep living in the midst of everything.

I think it went on a little bit too long. And I hope this format isn’t used again by Scalzi because I really like books about characters that I get to know. But looking back at it, I don’t know what I would cut because even though many of the chapters were not “necessary” for the story, each of them helped to round out a different facet of life in a way that I would not want to cut.

I listened to this on audiobook. Wil Wheaton narrated as he does with many of Scalzi’s humorous books. Wheaton is a good narrator for Scalzi, he has just enough snark and pacing to get the humor without over doing it. If I had to recommend only one Scalzi book, I would suggest Starter Villain for humor or Old Man’s War for traditional scifi. But I still recommend this one as a solid book worth reading.

When the Moon Hits Your Eye by John Scalzi Purchase Links: Paperback, Kindle Edition, Audible.com Audiobook

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.

I did preorder the second book in the series, but that doesn’t come out until April 2027 (the preorder was only $3.99 on kindle). I mostly like mysteries for the characters over time. This has a cast of characters and there is some space for growth, so I will give it another book or so because while it was an enjoyable light cozy read, it also was not hugely memorable.

The Oxford Detective Society by Faith Martin: Paperback, Kindle Edition, Audible.com Audiobook

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.

Many people are broadly familiar with this story. But I think the most familiar parts, the Cyclops, the sirens, the whirlpool are not remembered as being such small parts of the book. All three are part of what Odysseus is telling people after the fact when he is acting as his own bard. As one person I saw said, he should be considered one of the first unreliable narrators. I saw someone complaining about how long it too for it to be the real story home (they were insinuating that the book was about Odysseus and therefore of course it would start with his story.) But it is well into the book before Odysseus is really a character in the narrative. We need to understand the scene first. The trojan war, and Armageddon’s death and the displeasure of the gods matter to why it is that Odysseus is losing men and spending time not making much progress.

I do want to read some other versions of the story by other authors (not just other translators). Virgil, Ovid and others also have their own versions and I think some of the complaints about Nolan’s adaptation is that he does draw on other sources, not just Wilson’s version of Homer.

I am not capable of judging the quality of translation, but I think this is a very readable version and I think Danes did a good job narrating. It is worth picking up.

The Odyssey by Homer translated by Emily Wilson Purchase Links: Kindle Edition, Audible.com Audiobook

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.

I did make it through, and while I don’t regret it, I realize that what I wanted was the original because I have a decent familiarity with the rough story. What is helpful here is that the timeline and the main points are well covered. I think I will understand the original more because I have read this. I am going to see if I can get through all or most of Wilson’s translation before next Sunday.

Odyssey: The Greek Myths Reimagined by Stephen Fry Purchase Links: Hardcover, Kindle Edition, Audible.com Audiobook

About three months ago I read Thomas Jay Oord’s recently released A Systematic Theology of Love. I was very impressed with it. It is clearly written. It has a very good critique of the lack of attention to love within systematic theology, rightly pointing out that most systematic theology is oriented toward sovereignty, knowledge or power. And I think most important for me, I think his critique that many Christians talk about God’s love of us in a way that doesn’t particularly seem loving.

That being said, with very few exceptions, I think the clarity of the writing meant that a second reading did not really give me more insight or better answer my questions or concerns about his project. I think many of them will become more clear with the next two books of the trilogy. But those are not out yet and it will be at least two more years before they are out. I do think that some of the solutions being proposed for the problems that Oord is identifying are helpful. But I also think some introduce new and serious problems to his systematic theology. That being said I don’t think that as a lay person, I am going to be able to identify all of the problems, especially before the next two parts are out. I really do recommend this regardless of whether you find open and relational theology helpful because it is so clearly written and laid out.

One format note, The kindle edition (and I presume the paper) has three parts and is 507 pages of content. The audiobook version on Audible only includes the first two part of that and is 10.5 hours of narration. There is a note in the audiobook that says a second part of the audiobook will be sold separately, but it is not available on Audible yet. The audiobook was released on Audible in February 2026 and the Kindle edition was released March 1, 2026. So I am not sure that the second part of the audiobook is going to be released anytime soon. While the narration is done by Oord and is decent there are a few minor editing issues. I would just buy the kindle edition or paperback edition for now.

A Systematic Theology of Love, Volume 1: God and Creation by Thomas Jay Oord Purchase Links: Paperback, Kindle Edition, Audible.com Audiobook