One of my most amusing memories of grad school comes from the semester Kevin Hearn, author of the Iron Druid Chronicles, was the guest speaker. Someone asked him if he read romance novels, to which he replied he had enormous respect for romance writers but that it wasn’t a genre he enjoyed reading because he always felt like the male leads were taunting him with how they were having sex while he was reading a book.
At the time, I thought this was a funny answer to a good question. After a recent reading experience of my own, though, I now have a new perspective on this joke.
I recently finally got around to reading Matt Dinniman’s Dungeon Crawler Carl. It caught my eye when it came out, but I put off reading it because there have been so many hyped books I thought I would love, only to read them and think “meh.” Upon finishing Dungeon Crawler Carl, I did not think “meh,” but neither was I as pumped up as I expected. After all, it’s a book about a video-game style role-playing game with magic items, battles, quests, and so on.
In other words, exactly my jam. Something I do once or twice a week (depending on the week) and enjoy the heck out of. So, why didn’t I enjoy reading about it?
The answer came courtesy of Kevin Hearn’s throw-away response to the question about romance novels: I didn’t love reading about people playing a game because I wanted to be the one playing the game.
(Okay, perhaps not with the probability of certain death present in Dungeon Crawler Carl, but my point stands.)
This realization also explained why I have generally avoided LitRPG books up until now. If I want to read a book, I read a book. If I want to saunter off into a cave system and get attacked by kobolds, then darn it, I want to do that—not read about someone doing it. #IdRatherBeGaming
Admittedly, I’ve always been more of an RPG than a video-game person, which may also explain my response to LitRPG. Despite it having RPG in the name, it does lean more toward the video-game side of things, not the character sheets and poorly drawn grid maps I revel in. Oh, how we teased one of my college gamemasters about his “trees.”
That said, now that I’ve broken the seal, as it were, I plan to read the rest of the Dungeon Crawler Carl series and probably expand into more LitRPG as the mood strikes me. Maybe I’ll even convince my D&D group to start a book club so I have people to talk about LitRPG with on a regular basis. (If any of you are reading this, consider yourself forewarned.)
Got a genre you feel like you should love but find yourself avoiding? Tell me about in the comments.
For now, I’ll get back to my current read: Colin Gets Promoted and Dooms the World by Mark Waddell.
👋 Fair travels,
Mary
P.S. This image did not have an artist associated with it, so here’s a link to the image on Pixabay.
P.P.S. All books link to The Storygraph because I love that site and want to introduce it to as many people as possible.
