books
Book Notes 4: American Gods by Neil Gaiman
I’ve been reading Neil Gaiman’s blog since the time when he was writing this book — as, I’m sure, have most of us, what with his site being the number one hit on Google when you search for ‘neil’.
But I hadn’t actually read the book until now. I had read the first chapter online, and I had an idea roughly what it was about: real gods (maybe all gods) walking the Earth in the present day.
And it’s a stormer of a book. The pages just keep turning, the quotes are quotable (girl-Sam’s “I believe” speech is particularly fine) and myths are mashed up in glorious style.
It’s shortcomings are, perhaps, that it slows down a bit too much in the middle section; and Wednesday and Shadow make perhaps too many visits to down-at-heel gods without anything very specific happening during them. It reads like a road movie in places (which is fine), and it would probably make a good one.
There are surprises right up to the end, though, and I’m sure I’ll read it again in the future.
Technorati Tags: books, book notes, american gods, neil gaiman, 2006
Book Notes 2: Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
Yes, and only a day after the last one. It took me a bit longer than that to read it, mind you.
A science-fiction book that was nominated for the Booker: amazing. And have no doubt about it: this is a science-fiction book. Just as Nineteen Eighty Four is; and Orwell’s masterpiece is perhaps the best reference point for Cloud Atlas. The appearance of O’Brien’s Goldstein‘s book within Winston Smith’s story may well have been a model for Mitchell’s multiply-embedded stories.
Book Notes 1: A Dance to the Music of Time vol 1, by Anthony Powell
This year I’m going to try to record all the books I read, and write mini-reviews of them. I’m not quite going for the "50 Book Challenge" thing, because I doubt that I can actually manage one a week, what with one thing and another. But I ought to be able to get through a few more than last year, since I’m not doing an OU course. And in fact it’s nearly the end of January, and I have already read three books and started a fourth: so, not too bad, then. I’m just a bit behind on posting about them.
For Christmas I got volume 1 of A Dance to the Music of Time: A Question of Upbringing. I started reading it on Christmas day, so we’ll have to allow the year to start and end there.
I have been hearing quite a lot about Anthony Powell’s twelve-volume masterpiece recently: there was a whole Radio 4 programme about it, which I heard bits of twice. And I notice John Peel’s Desert Island Discs listing on Wikipedia, recently, and Dance was the book he chose.
So I was keen to read it, despite having seen the TV adaptation a few years ago, and thought it seem very shallow and superficial.