A while back, HarperCollins set up Browse Inside access to American Gods: you can read the first hundred-plus pages for free, online. (I have a vague idea it was only fifty pages when they first set it up, but it's over a hundred now.)
Various people had, of course, said good things about it over the years; I had always had the vague idea that it wasn't my kind of thing, but I figured, hey, free online, might as well check it out.
So it sat in an open browser window, slowing down my computer, for a couple of months.
Finally I sat down and read through the excerpt. And found myself enjoying it more than I'd expected.
So next time I was in a bookstore, I saw a copy on the shelf and bought it.
Of course, it's a 600-page book, so having read the first 50 pages online didn't really make much of a dent in it. I don't tend to like long books, and I don't tend to read them. But I went ahead with this one, and it was a quick, smooth read.
I ended up liking it quite a bit. Perhaps a few too many cute jokes, of the sort about which writing workshops usually say "kill your darlings," but they were mostly funny so I forgave that. And the book was more insightful and had more to say about America than I would have expected.
It occurred to me about halfway through that the book is kind of like an extension of Sandman in some ways. A bunch of anthropomorphic personifications of human ideas, with their own personalities and foibles, interacting with the modern world, strengthened by belief, etc. Little side stories that could have been single-issue stories of a comic. An American travelogue novel with at least one somewhat horrory subplot that could've come straight out of Alan Moore's "American Gothic" storyline from Swamp Thing.
I don't mean to insult or criticize the book or the author by saying that. I think it goes richer and deeper than Sandman in some ways--it's an extension and elaboration of some of the themes and ideas, in a different direction--and I liked Sandman quite a lot, and American Gods would've made a longer comic book series than Sandman. I'm not saying it should have been done as a comic or anything like that; just that it's more similar, in some interesting ways, to Sandman than I had expected from what I've read of Gaiman's other prose fiction.
(Wrote this back in early March but neglected to post it.)
For the first month, it was the entire book. But the interface was annoying enough for it to not be worth the bother. I don't know if that's been improved since.
(I ended up reading it in print a couple of months ago, and didn't really care for it, alas. I liked the sort-of sequel Anansi Boys way more, though.)