American Gods
Ratings1,296
Average rating4
Overall a good book, very well written. However, not my kind of story. I read it with a science fiction / fantasy mindset, and it has very little of that. The whole gods plot was pretty much a background for the true story of the book.
Basically it's a story about an ex-con walking around the USA. It's more of a travel, sight seeing and ‘small town getting to know', kind of book.
Interesting characters, good dialogs, but lack of a climax and exciting scenes.
Picked it up when I heard that a TV series is in the works. It's an entertaining twist on modernized mythology, but it's nothing like Percy Jackson.
It felt a little rush and at times he seemed to use pop interpretation of cultures, mythologies, and their gods. I love the vignette scattered through out the book.
I'm trying to remember whether or not I've read any of Gaiman's other novels before, and I'm fairly certain that I haven't. I read [b:Good Omens 12067 Good Omens Terry Pratchett http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1266659394s/12067.jpg 4110990], but that was co-written with [a:Terry Pratchett 1654 Terry Pratchett http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1235562205p2/1654.jpg], and the collaboration was genius. I know that the entire world seems to love Sandman, of course, but I'm just not a fan of graphic novels. In fact, it took me a while to realize that the Good Omens co-author and the Sandman author were one and the same. I've certainly read some short stories, too. The most memorable, “Snow, Glass, Apples” was reprinted in an anthology I read recently. I find it disturbing, so I won't re-read it. Well-written, of course—it wouldn't be so very memorably distressing if it weren't so masterfully done! (I found the text online if you care to read it, but please understand that the story deals with pedophilia, necrophilia, and incest here. It is the polar opposite of all things Disney.) Snow White was never one of of my favorite fairy tales, and Gaiman definitely pushed it much farther down the list.In any case, I don't know what I was expecting from Gaiman, but American Gods wasn't it. I like stories with happy endings, and within the first few chapters I was fairly sure that there wouldn't be one. Is Gaiman fundamentally opposed to joy, or is it just happiness that he doesn't allow?The novel is epic. It is masterful. All that stuff from the big critics is dead on. The book could be used as the backbone of a mythological scavenger hunt if a teacher were willing to run a very unstructured but engaging course that way. I certainly enjoyed that aspect of it, and it made me glad that I was reading it on my iTouch so that I could look up anything I liked online at any time, no matter where I happened to be (which was almost always at home or somewhere else that had wifi access, happily). I seldom want to see illustrations in any book, but yes, I think I would like to see good pictures of some of the characters Gaiman described in this one. On the other hand, without artwork I spent time imagining what the characters looked like based on the descriptions. I don't normally stop to do that, as such matters as seldom relevant to a plot, but these beings caught my fancy. Not enough that I would sit through an entire graphic novel, I'm afraid, but if I saw one now I might flip through it to see how the artist's renderings compare with my versions.I'm seldom able to identify an overall Theme to the books I read. Most of them, honestly, are fluff. I'm fine with that. I read them because they entertain me. American Gods is different. It is entertaining, but it isn't light or fluffy in the least. It definitely has an easily identifiably Theme and Tropes and all those elements that I recall from long-ago classes, the sorts of things that put me off from my original English major because I hated tearing other author's works apart instead of writing anything original. (Now, I begin to understand that we were being taught to recognize what makes for good writing so we might have some hope of possibly creating some of it one day.)I somewhat timidly conclude that American Gods is the first piece of Literature I've read in a very long time, and well worth the time spent reading it. (I find it rather amusing that it would be British Literature, despite its title, due to the author's nationality.) I'm not going to state the theme, because that would be a spoiler, and I hate putting those in reviews—but it's something that I see as a Truth, and one that needs to be stated far more often, especiallly today. It's even more interesting that it took a Brit to say it.The book is dark, although it does have some very bright spots in it. I will acknowledge that I was going through a particularly bad time with regards to my health when I was reading it, but I still think it might be best for some people to read this one when in a fairly positive state of mind.
This was a pretty good, well-told story. I started reading this after I watched the TV series. Despite this being a good book, I felt the TV series was better. But I highly recommend both!
I hate to think of the amount of time I spent on this, well, worthless book. My problem with it lies in how I kept hoping the story would start making some sort of sense - and it doesn't. I got to see a guy named Shadow take a ridiculous trip across America meeting some weird people and getting into some weird situations. At the end of it, I can't see what the point of it all was. Maybe its because I'm not American? I'm not so sure. There's something fundamentally wrong about this book. I can't say what it is though.
I read American Gods once and became good at USA geography
Man, I nearly gave this book only 3 stars. I was simply enjoying the fun roadtrip and then visiting Gods and hearing them rant about how hard their lives were, so going through the chapter where Shadow decides he'll sacrifice himself and gets tied up was a drag and totally uninteresting to me. The revelation of his connection to Wednesday amused me less than it should've. Luckily for me, Shadow returns to Lakeside later and uncovers the mystery surrounding the missing kids and that was enough to get me back into the story again.
Oh yeah, when Easter gets introduced I remembered the reason I finally decided to pick this up was because I watched the TV series. They are quite different from each other, but I think I like some things the TV series did more. The TV adaptation made Laura less forgettable and Mad Sweeney, a character that entertains me a lot, shows up a lot more often.
Plus, it has Cool Jesus
Unfortunately, I think the way I read this one stymied my enjoyment of it... between returning to the city, apartment hunting, moving, travelling... it was a fractured reading experience that prevented me from being able to truly immerse myself. Gaiman is an entertaining and assuredly imaginative writer, so it's a fun read. Not sure what genre to put this in... fantasy/sci-fi with a bit of a mystery twist? The concept is interesting, at a high level: that the gods our ancestors brought over from various cultures are eventually subsumed by the new deities of TV, computers, etc. But I think the message was a bit heavy-handed at times. Curious to watch the TV show, as I could see how it would lend itself well to the screen (is there irony there?).
An gripping journey into a universe that looks like ours, but not quite. Weird, scary, absorbing and inventive, Gaiman explores a darker landscape than Stephen King, without as much gore as Clive Barker, and with the kind of creepy discomfort that characterises Michael Marshall's novels (as well as John Connolly's earlier ones). I found this delivered on the promise of the Sandman graphic novels Gaiman wrote, but I have not enjoyed his other novels nearly as much.
This is my first time reading any of Neil Gaiman's works. I really did enjoy the book Neil's ability to describe everything is great and putting yourself in thr moment like you were truly there. What I struggled with is just the story itself, which really didn't pick up until towards the end. I just didn't think the story flowed all too well at points and the book fell a little flat.
Still would recommend the book, and will be reading Neverwhere next personally.
While the story is fascinating, I just don't think this book is for me. It got confusing at times, and it got draggy at parts and a little too complicated for my romance-addled brain.
“Now, as all of you will have had reason aplenty to discover for yourselves, there are new gods growing in America, clinging to growing knots of belief: gods of credit card and freeway, of Internet and telephone, of radio and hospital and television, gods of plastic and of beeper and of neon. Proud gods, fat and foolish creatures, puffed up with their own newness and importance.”
The symbolism, the nuance, the metaphors – I somehow could understand it, but yet it will take some time for me to digest it, to really comprehend the meaning. This book is a little too advance for me, perhaps.
AVISO: este livro, como a série deve ser assistida pelos indivíduos com mais de 18 anos.
Sei que já publiquei sobre a série, mas eu decidi ler também o livro. E para ser sincera as coisas no livro são um pouco diferentes. Acho que, por ser uma série, eles tentaram explorar mais o universo dos Deuses, por isso é que a história é um pouco diferente. Falando realmente do livro, eu já tinha começado a lê-lo antes de conhecer sobre a série e para ser sincera, foi muito difícil acompanha-lo. É tão complexo e cheio de vida, que perdi-me um pouco. Mas depois vi a série e percebi que tinha mesmo que acabar o livro.
A história ronda à volta do Shadow Moon, um homem que está preso por agressão e quem deixou a mulher sozinha em casa quase à 3 anos. Tudo muda, quando os polícias decidem que deviam liberta-lo mais cedo, porque pelos vistos à mulher dele morreu num acidente de carro. Desiludido e perdido da vida, Shadow apanha o avião e vai para à casa. Durante a sua viagem, conhece o Wednesday - um homem misterioso mas ao mesmo tempo conhecido, que lhe oferece um emprego - ser o guarda costas pessoal. Shadow, não tendo nada a perder aceita isso e a vida dele muda completamente. Ele percebe que vem uma tempestade, uma guerra esta entre os Deuses, Deuses antigos e Deuses novos, aqueles que foram trazidos para América e os que foram criados individualmente nas cidades. Tudo está por um triz, e o Shadow não sabe o que está a fazer no meio disso.
Já conheciam o livro? Ou a série? Tencionam ler ou acham aborrecido??
The idea behind this book is grand. The fight for America's soul... as told by a foreigner (Neil Gaiman). Good characters all around, although I wasn't as tied to the lead as I could have been.
I was expecting so much from this book and came away slightly disappointed. Yes it deals with a lot of themes; love, loss, betrayal etc and it deals with these well I just thought that for me, the middle part of the story was slightly weak. It did pick up again towards the end and I felt myself pulled back into the story and was engrossed again. It is certainly a memorable book with some great scenarios, the two man cons for instance. I enjoyed the book on the whole, but I guess the weight of expectation affected my experience.
I feel like maybe if I'd read this in 2001, it would've blown me away. Now, it all seems familiar, probably because by now it's become a “famous” book. And because all of its core ideas about gods and faith and belief have been explored repeatedly in some of my favorite books, like Small Gods and Good Omens. It also seemed that there were several revelations that were supposed to surprise me throughout the book, but almost nothing was genuinely surprising.
There's probably a metaphor built in, about the “aura” around this book building up over the years and developing some kind of power on its own, beyond the quality of the book itself. I'm still a big fan of Gaiman's, and still consider Good Omens to be my favorite novel, but reading all the supplementary material in the 10th anniversary edition (which is already 8 years old at this point) has tempered that a little bit. A lot of the conversational writing that I found incredibly charming in the late 80s now comes across as affectation. I definitely liked American Gods, but I can't help feeling like it's gone past its read-by date.
My feeling about this book is a bit controversial.
I liked a lot of things about American Gods. Almost all the historicl parts and the ending, when all the mysteries started to unravel. My favourite part was how similar the main plot was to a coin trick. I was not even thinking about the possibility of what was actually happening.
And that's a really great thing. It's good to be surprised once in a while.
But not all is good in paradise. There was a lot of stuff that I was not a fan of. For example, language. I've got truly tired of all “boobies” and “pussies”. That's why I liked the ending much, much more than the beginning. There was just not a time for all this things.
The story was so slow in the beginning. It was boring a lot. Or maybe I just wasn't in a mood for this book.
Anyway, that's not a bad book after all.
This book was marvelous, fantastic and legendary characters, great build up. Wonderful storytelling.
I should read this again in English (they didn't have it at the local library in English). Perhaps it will gain 5 stars then.
4.5 stars, rounded up to 5
Incredibly unique book, that encompassed more than I ever could have expected. My recent reviews have been too reliant on spoilers, so I'll keep this one succinct and spoiler free.
It felt like this entire book was one big trick Gaiman was playing. He throws you into a setting of Middle America, as mundane as he can create, tempting you to lose focus or read with haste – yet the reader is rewarded for every tidbit of information they can hold onto, from the first moment they started chapter one. Excellent.