Dungeon Crawler Carl

My friends gave me this book on my birthday and I have to say I loved it. I read it as fast as I could and it's quite entertaining.

It was not on my radar, so it was a nice surprise, and an excellent summer read if you're looking for one.

Book premise

I'll try not to spoil anything, but if you want to be completely surprised, skip this part.

From Wikipedia:

The series follows Carl and his ex-girlfriend's cat, Princess Donut, two of the few survivors of the mining, transporting, processing, and consumption of Earth's resources by an alien corporation, as they are forced to compete in a dungeon crawl recreated from those resources for an intergalactic reality show program.

The cat is on all covers so I don't feel bad revealing this, but I didn't know about it and was quite surprised when it showed up.

The pineapple on the cover is also a nice addition and that's all I'll say.

The author

I didn't know Matt Dinniman but after reading this book I like him a lot. He self-published the first book and due to the massive success he got a publishing deal for 7 sequels! You read that correctly. If you like the first book there's a lot to read.

And I'm happy for him. He's quite talented and I'm happier that now I have 7 more books to read, in case you're wondering :).

Why did I like it?

Reading the book, you can fully understand that he liked "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" because the humor is there, and that's one of the reasons I liked it a lot. I also liked "Awaken Online" (I'll write about the series later).

The genre of LitRPG is quite challenging for someone who hasn't gamed in 30 plus years.

If you're not ware, LitRPG is a genre where you're inside a game playing along with the characters. You know about the game rules and you see their progress. It's the old people's (myself included) version of watching kids playing on YouTube.

It's quite entertaining and in this case works quite well.

Where you can find it

Matt's Website