From Goodreads –
First published in 2001, American Gods became an instant classic—an intellectual and artistic benchmark from the multiple-award-winning master of innovative fiction, Neil Gaiman. Now discover the mystery and magic of American Gods in this tenth-anniversary edition. Newly updated and expanded with the author’s preferred text, this commemorative volume is a true celebration of a modern masterpiece by the one, the only, Neil Gaiman.
A storm is coming…
Locked behind bars for three years, Shadow did his time, quietly waiting for the magic day when he could return to Eagle Point, Indiana. A man no longer scared of what tomorrow might bring, all he wanted was to be with Laura, the wife he deeply loved, and start a new life.
But just days before his release, Laura and Shadow’s best friend are killed in an accident. With his life in pieces and nothing to keep him tethered, Shadow accepts a job from a beguiling stranger he meets on the way home, an enigmatic man who calls himself Mr. Wednesday. A trickster and rogue, Wednesday seems to know more about Shadow than Shadow does himself.
Life as Wednesday’s bodyguard, driver, and errand boy is far more interesting and dangerous than Shadow ever imagined—it is a job that takes him on a dark and strange road trip and introduces him to a host of eccentric characters whose fates are mysteriously intertwined with his own. Along the way Shadow will learn that the past never dies; that everyone, including his beloved Laura, harbors secrets; and that dreams, totems, legends, and myths are more real than we know. Ultimately, he will discover that beneath the placid surface of everyday life a storm is brewing—an epic war for the very soul of America—and that he is standing squarely in its path.
Dajuroka rating 9.5
American Gods is a Hugo and Nebula Award-winning novel by Neil Gaiman.
The book won the 2002 Hugo, Nebula, Locus,[1] SFX Magazine and Bram Stoker Awards, all for Best Novel, and likewise received nominations for the 2001 BSFA Award, as well as the 2002 World Fantasy, International Horror Guild and Mythopoeic, and British Fantasy awards. It won the 2003 Geffen Award.
Read some detailed spoilers on Wiki if you must. You should just read and see where it takes you. Initially off putting you eventually come to grasp the brilliance in the analogies and rich use of myth and history.
American Gods: The Tenth Anniversary Edition (Enhanced Edition) by Neil Gaiman
Some of my loved quotes from this brilliant author –
“You never learn how to write a novel,” he told me. “You only learn to write the novel you’re on.”
“Information and knowledge: these are currencies that have never gone out of style.”
“For the joy’s gone out of me now, like the pee from a small boy in a swimming pool on a hot day.”
“Every hour wounds. The last one kills.”
“How’d you lose your eye?” Wednesday shoveled half a dozen pieces of bacon into his mouth, chewed, wiped the fat from his lips with the back of his hand. “Didn’t lose it,” he said. “I still know exactly where it is.”
Okay: how can we be sure the CIA wasn’t involved in the Kennedy assassination?” “I don’t know,” said Stone. “How can we be sure?” “He’s dead, isn’t he?”
“We were so poor that we couldn’t afford a fire. Come New Year’s Eve my father would suck on a peppermint, and us kids, we’d stand around with our hands outstretched, basking in the glow.”
“Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.” —BEN FRANKLIN, POOR RICHARD’S ALMANACK
Tonight, as you eat, reflect if you can: there are children starving in the world, starving in numbers larger than the mind can easily hold, up in the big numbers where an error of a million here, a million there, can be forgiven. It may be uncomfortable for you to reflect upon this or it may not, but still, you will eat.
“No man, proclaimed Donne, is an Island, and he was wrong. If we were not islands, we would be lost, drowned in each others’ tragedies.”
“We need individual stories. Without individuals we see only numbers: a thousand dead, a hundred thousand dead, “casualties may rise to a million.” With individual stories, the statistics become people—but even that is a lie, for the people continue to suffer in numbers that themselves are numbing and meaningless. Look, see the child’s swollen, swollen belly, and the flies that crawl at the corners of his eyes, his skeletal limbs: will it make it easier for you to know his name, his age, his dreams, his fears? To see him from the inside? And if it does, are we not doing a disservice to his sister, who lies in the searing dust beside him, a distorted, distended caricature of a human child? And there, if we feel for them, are they now more important to us than a thousand other children touched by the same famine, a thousand other young lives who will soon be food for the flies’ own myriad squirming children?”
He said, “Read me anything interesting you find in the paper.” Shadow looked carefully, and he turned the pages slowly, but he couldn’t find anything.
“You are an analog girl, living in a digital world.”
“Life is a cabernet”
“Organizing gods is like herding cats into straight lines.”
“That there’s a cat in a box somewhere who’s alive and dead at the same time (although if they don’t ever open the box to feed it, it’ll eventually just be two different kinds of dead)”
Canada Bill sighed, and shrugged his shoulders, and said, ‘I know. But it’s the only game in town.’
“I know it’s crooked. But it’s the only game in town.” — Canada Bill Jones
Some interesting areas from the book –
One question that has always intrigued me is what happens to demonic beings when immigrants move from their homelands. Irish-Americans remember the fairies, Norwegian-Americans the nisser, Greek-Americans the vrykólakas, but only in relation to events remembered in the Old Country. When I once asked why such demons are not seen in America, my informants giggled confusedly and said “They’re scared to pass the ocean, it’s too far,” pointing out that Christ and the apostles never came to America. — Richard Dorson, “A Theory for American Folklore,” American Folklore and the Historian (University of Chicago Press, 1971
The boundaries of our country, sir? Why sir, onto the north we are bounded by the Aurora Borealis, on the east we are bounded by the rising sun, on the south we are bounded by the procession of the Equinoxes, and on the west by the Day of Judgement. —THE AMERICAN JOE MILLER’S JEST BOOK
“This paper,” said Natalie, “has another one of those articles in it. ‘Is America Changing?’” “Well, is it?” “They don’t say. They say that maybe it is, but they don’t know how and they don’t know why, and maybe it isn’t happening at all.” Sam smiled broadly. “Well,” she said, “that covers every option, doesn’t it?”