Skulls in the Stars

Book 29 for my 2026 goal of 36 books for the year! Still comfortably ahead with my reading. My link to the book is through my bookshop.org affiliate account, which means I may earn a small commission if you buy from there.

Okay, I lied. In my last Dungeon Crawler Carl post, I vowed to read another book before continuing the Matt Dinniman authored series. But then I went to the bookstore and bought The Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook (2024), decided to sit and read for a few minutes, and… off I went.

It says a lot about this series that I haven’t been able to stop reading it — it scratches multiple literary itches for me all at once. There’s the Dungeons & Dragons style of adventure and computer roleplaying game aspects that I am very fond of. There’s the crunchy details of all the loot and insane convoluted plans that Carl and his colleagues concoct that satisfies some neurodivergent part of my brain. And then there’s simply the fact that the story is fun and fast-paced and filled with characters who are simultaneously silly and endearing. Finally, Dinniman has set up a world where literally almost anything can happen — and usually does.

Book 28 for my 2026 goal of 36 books for the year! Still comfortably ahead with my reading. My link to the book is through my bookshop.org affiliate account, which means I may earn a small commission if you buy from there.

Yeah I had to go read the second book of the Dungeon Crawler Carl series! The first book was fun and fast-paced and charming and got me curious to learn more, so I went ahead and got Carl’s Doomsday Scenario (2024).

As a bit of a recap, if you don’t feel like reading my previous post (or the first book): Earth has been conquered by an intergalactic alien corporation and many of the survivors like Carl have been coerced in participating in a life-or-death reality game show. The ‘crawlers’ must descend through 18 levels of dungeons, each more perilous than the last, and can earn their freedom somewhere around level 11 if they so desire. If they want to save Earth, however, one of them must make it through level 18 — and nobody has ever, in the history of dungeon crawls, ever made it past level 15.

Book 26 for my 2026 goal of 36 books for the year! Still comfortably ahead with my reading. My link to the book is through my bookshop.org affiliate account, which means I may earn a small commission if you buy from there.

In my reading and blog writing, I tend to focus on lesser known authors and books and shy away from the mega bestsellers. Part of this is as “service”: I like to highlight things that people are less likely to have seen. Part of it however is just my own aversion to join the “hype” in a popular work! This is part of why it took me until 2024 to finally read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

But I became curious about Dungeon Crawler Carl, a now lengthy series of novels by Matt Dinniman named after the first book that came out in 2020. I wasn’t necessarily expecting to get drawn into it, but I was really won over by the story, which went in directions and had more depth than I anticipated!