{"id":11929,"date":"2009-05-09T21:19:18","date_gmt":"2009-05-10T04:19:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2009\/05\/09\/11929.html"},"modified":"2009-05-09T21:19:18","modified_gmt":"2009-05-10T04:19:18","slug":"american-gods","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2009\/05\/09\/american-gods\/","title":{"rendered":"American Gods"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A while back, HarperCollins set up Browse Inside access to American Gods<\/cite>: you can read the first hundred-plus pages<\/a> 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.)<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

So it sat in an open browser window, slowing down my computer, for a couple of months.<\/p>\n

Finally I sat down and read through the excerpt. And found myself enjoying it more than I'd expected.<\/p>\n

So next time I was in a bookstore, I saw a copy on the shelf and bought it.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

It occurred to me about halfway through that the book is kind of like an extension of Sandman<\/cite> 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<\/cite>.<\/p>\n

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<\/cite> in some ways--it's an extension and elaboration of some of the themes and ideas, in a different direction--and I liked Sandman<\/cite> quite a lot, and American Gods<\/cite> would've made a longer comic book series than Sandman<\/cite>. 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<\/cite> than I had expected from what I've read of Gaiman's other prose fiction.<\/p>\n

(Wrote this back in early March but neglected to post it.)<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A while back, HarperCollins set up Browse Inside access to American Gods: you can read the first hundred-plus pages for…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11929","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11929","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11929"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11929\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11929"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11929"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11929"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}