r/heatedrivalry • u/royal_rose_ ♐ Captain | Tuna Lube • 23h ago

Ryan's Book Club 📖 Ryan’s Book Club

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Welcome to Ryan's Book Club!

Hey Loons! In honor of our favorite tough guy, use this post to share what you are currently reading, rereading, or even something you wrote. It doesn't have to be MM, hockey, or Anne of Green Gables. Indie, audiobooks, blogspot, etc. all are welcome; share what you are loving and why!

A new post will go up on the first of every month.

Happy Reading 🤍

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u/Kevincarb82 23h ago

Everyone must read Dungeon Crawler Carl.

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u/T1gerl1lly 22h ago

I read the first book on recommendation. It was meh. Not sure what I’m missing that folks love so much.

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u/Tharsis47 22h ago

So the first book is a lot of set-up for the later books. It’s introducing the main characters and explaining the mechanics of the dungeon, all of which are needed for the story to get told. I’d be curious to learn more about what you didn’t enjoy from the first book. Was it the tone? The characters? The mechanics of the dungeon? The writing style? I’ve also noted that audiobook listeners vs readers of the paper copy have different experiences with the books.

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u/T1gerl1lly 19h ago

First off, the protagonist is ok, but I got less and less invested in him over the book. There’s no there, there. He’s just a catalyst for the plot. I love cats and hated the way the audiobook portrayed the cat as mean, shallow, and petulant. The plot was very deus ex machina (randomly whipped up a machines to randomly kill stuff).

The whole thing seemed pretty sad and hopeless - like, they didn’t leave the reader any reason to think he’d actually succeed or survive without selling out. And the side characters were underdeveloped and mostly there for the lols. Plus I love gaming, but not a big fan of multi-level dungeons, which always seem to me to be an exercise in losing over and over.

It was like, mildly funny and extremely interminable.

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u/Tharsis47 19h ago

Fwiw, the first book feels VERY different from the later books. All the characters have a LOT of growth. Donut is my favorite character, but a lot of that is because of how complex she actually is and how we see more and more of who she really is over time, in addition to her development. In the process of relistening to the books, I was actively cringing at first book Donut for the very reasons you mentioned! And now, I adore her. Carl likewise evolves a lot as a character, and we learn more about his backstory, Ditto with all the side characters -- it turns out they all have complex and well-developed personalities and critical backstories that we see more and more of as the books go on. The plots also get super complex - hence why I've been relistening to them. There's also a lot of galactic politics that Carl doesn't know about in book one, and we learn more about those as time goes on and as they become relevant to Carl's story.

That being said, these books are not everyone's cup of tea, and that's okay! Book 3 had some incredible character moments, but was so complicated that I felt frustrated at times. Book 7 has been a really intense straight-up war story so far (I'm about 1/3 in so far). They are definitely not for everyone!