How do I convince you to read a book with as ludicrous a title as "Dungeon Crawler Carl," with as ludicrous main characters as a loser boyfriend and his cheating girlfriend's prize-winning Persian cat, and with as ludicrous a premise as aliens have leveled our planet and turned it into a role-playing game for a galaxy-wide TV reality show with surviving humans as contestants? It sounds stupid. It shouldn't work. I shouldn't like it.
But every character runs deep and grows over time. Every plotline thickens and surprises. Every subtle point, background detail, and motivating event builds tension, creates relationships, and drives action that make you laugh, think, and care deeply about Carl and Donut's world and your own. I love the entire book series, and you will too if you give it a chance.
P.S. Apparently, the audio books are tremendous (saving them for a later re-read).
A man. His ex-girlfriend's cat. A sadistic game show unlike anything in the universe: a dungeon crawl where survival depends on killing your prey in the most entertaining way possible.
In a flash, every human-erected construction on Earth—from Buckingham Palace to the tiniest of sheds—collapses in a heap, sinking into the ground.
The buildings and all the people inside have all been atomized and transformed into the dungeon: an 18-level labyrinth filled with traps, monsters, and loot. A dungeon so enormous, it circles the entire globe.
A close friend of mine who is deaf recommended Articulate to me, as a way to better understand what life is like for her. I have some disabilities and my son is autistic, so I'm familiar with how a physical or neurological difference can impact your life. However, I was stunned by the broad range of consequences of having your ability to communicate in society compromised. Anyone who has traveled knows the feelings of disorientation, otherness, and helplessness provoked by not speaking the native language. If you are deaf, you have those feelings wherever you are. It impacts every aspect of your life, and every effort you take to mitigate those impacts is judged, sometimes harshly, by the one community that understands you. If you know deaf individuals or just want to understand what it's like being deaf, I highly recommend this book.
Named a best book of the year by Kirkus Reviews Named a Notable Book of 2025 by the Washington Post
A deaf writer's exploration of language, communication, and what it means to be articulate-and her journey to reclaim her voice
Rachel Kolb was born profoundly deaf the same year that the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed, and she grew up as part of the first generation of deaf people with legal rights to accessibility services. Still, from a young age, she contorted herself to expectations set by a world that prioritizes hearing people. So even while she found clarity…
I've followed the Israeli Palestinian conflict since I was six years old. As complex as it is, I thought I understood the basic history and the positions of both sides. I was wrong. Tomorrow Is Yesterday opened my eyes to the broad range of personalities, history, and efforts to bring peace to the Middle East from a first-person perspective. It is written in a clear, compelling, and balanced manner, which is rare for such a book. If you care about the people impacted by this conflict, and the efforts to achieve peace and stability to one of the world's most fraught regions, please read this book.
On October 7, 2023, Hamas fighters killed more than eleven hundred Israelis and took more than two hundred hostages, prompting an Israeli response that has in turn taken tens of thousands of lives and devastated the Gaza Strip. Why did this happen, and can anything be done to grant peace and justice to Israelis and Palestinians alike? In Tomorrow Is Yesterday, the analyst Hussein Agha and the diplomat Robert Malley offer a personal and bracing perspective on how the hopes of the Oslo Peace Process became the horrors of the present. Drawing on their experience advising the Palestinian leadership (Arafat…
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