Runo Knows...American Gods
Ha! Caught you off-guard with a Gaiman book, and there's a reason for that.
I'd read his collaboration with Terry Pratchett before (Good Omens) a long time ago. He's been one of those writers that I always mean to read, and never quite getting around to pulling the trigger on buying one of his books.
I started reading his LJ feed and when I saw him putting up a poll as to which book to put up for free, I voted for American Gods and it won. That's been one of the books I've always meant to read.
So when it went up, I read it all. Took me about two days, including a long, hungover read on Sunday morning.
Wow. Needless to say, it's in my Amazon.com cart right now. A book that good deserves to be owned.
It's the story of a battle between the gods, between the old gods that came over from other lands to the Americas against the new gods of technology. It's about a man named Shadow, just out of prison, who had gone on thinking about his wife just to find her killed in a car crash just before he left. It's about trickery and honor and all kinds of other things.
It's a helluva good read. It's sad, it's poignant, it's got a bit of adventure, drama...it's a hard book to describe, really. I'd almost say "it's sad in a good way" through a lot of it, but I'm just impressed with how good it was despite what I felt was overpromotion in my own head from having heard how good it was.
So - yeah. Damn good book. I'm definitely not completely certain how to classify it...
I'd read his collaboration with Terry Pratchett before (Good Omens) a long time ago. He's been one of those writers that I always mean to read, and never quite getting around to pulling the trigger on buying one of his books.
I started reading his LJ feed and when I saw him putting up a poll as to which book to put up for free, I voted for American Gods and it won. That's been one of the books I've always meant to read.
So when it went up, I read it all. Took me about two days, including a long, hungover read on Sunday morning.
Wow. Needless to say, it's in my Amazon.com cart right now. A book that good deserves to be owned.
It's the story of a battle between the gods, between the old gods that came over from other lands to the Americas against the new gods of technology. It's about a man named Shadow, just out of prison, who had gone on thinking about his wife just to find her killed in a car crash just before he left. It's about trickery and honor and all kinds of other things.
It's a helluva good read. It's sad, it's poignant, it's got a bit of adventure, drama...it's a hard book to describe, really. I'd almost say "it's sad in a good way" through a lot of it, but I'm just impressed with how good it was despite what I felt was overpromotion in my own head from having heard how good it was.
So - yeah. Damn good book. I'm definitely not completely certain how to classify it...