I don’t know what to say about American Gods<\/i>, other than that I quite liked it, despite feeling like some parts of it lagged. (This may have been partly due to circumstances: while I was reading this book I got a cold, and when I have a cold I tend to be a bit grumpy and also to have at least one day where I do very little other than sleep, which seriously cuts into my reading time.) The premise of the book is satisfying: everyone who comes to a place brings their gods with them, and those gods, who draw life\/power from their believers, carry on living in that place, far as it may be from home. America, then, has a whole lot of gods in it, but lots of them are from times\/places that mean they have less of a following than they used to. Meanwhile, there are new gods, new things\/ideas where people put their energy and faith. The book sets itself up as being about the clash between old gods and new, but it isn’t, not really, though I’m not sure how to describe what it is<\/i> about. <\/p>\n
The book follows a character named Shadow, who’s finishing up a prison term as the book opens: he’s looking forward to going home and returning to normal life, though he has a sense of unease, a feeling that something’s about to go terribly wrong. Which it does: he ends up being told he’s getting released a few days early, because his wife has died in a car crash. There’s no normal life for him to go back to, and maybe normalcy is a fiction anyway, which becomes abundantly clear as he’s on his way home for his wife’s funeral: he somehow ends up on a plane sitting next to a man who knows his name, knows that his wife is dead, and offers him a job as his bodyguard\/errand guy. Despite misgivings, Shadow ends up working for this guy, who calls himself Wednesday, and things get weirder from there.<\/p>\n
I like how very full of things American Gods<\/i> is (gods and other mythological and folkloric creatures, coin tricks, cons, roadside attractions) and how the main story is interspersed with interludes about various deities\/magical beings (some of which are written by one of the characters in charming story-within-a-story fashion). This is the first novel-for-grownups by Neil Gaiman that I’ve read, and I look forward to reading more. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I don’t know what to say about American Gods, other than that I quite liked it, despite feeling like some parts of it lagged. (This may have been partly due to circumstances: while I was reading this book I got a cold, and when I have a cold I tend to be a bit grumpy […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8163","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8163","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8163"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8163\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8163"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8163"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8163"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}