Book of the gods

Book: American Gods

Author: Neil Gaiman

Published: 2002 (HaperCollins)

Pages: 588

Between this and the Doctor Who episode he wrote for series six, I’m going to start calling myself an official Neil Gaiman fan. He’s a master at bringing the psychological to life where it dances around and swigs whiskey before putting on its top hat to either save or swindle the world.

Shadow is, I think, a great unintentional guide through a reader’s first Gaiman book. Shadow’s not dumb, but he’s quiet, knows how to blend it, and rolls with the weird shit that starts happening to him as soon as he gets out of prison where he’s been practicing coin tricks for the past three years.

When he finds out that he no longer has a wife, best friend, or job from that best friend to go back to thanks to a car crash, he joins with a conman who needs a sort of errand boy. Might as well, right? Nothing else to go back to.

That’s pretty much Shadow’s attitude throughout the first goodly chunk of the book, which is great because we get to go along for the ride as much as he does—up until he discovers all the disturbing dreams he’s been having and all the literally shifty people he’s been meeting and all the places he’s been going and all the TVs that have been talking to him are the preparations of war between old and new gods.

I love how Gaiman builds deities as idea that become incarnate and live where they hitched a ride into America with all the eleventy billion waves of settlers. The old ones (Easter—no, not that one, the pagan one—and Odin and Anansi and the like) are scratching out scruffy existences because no one believes in them anymore. The new ones (mostly technology) are terrified they’ll become obsolete as quickly as the gadgets that represent them.  Basically, there’s no more room for both sanctions, so they’re going to war over America for its faith energy.

OR ARE THEY? (Spoiler alert. Repeat, spoiler alert down below. And it’s a pretty good one, so don’t look if you haven’t read and want to. FOR REALZ.)

It turns out that Loki and Odin are manipulating the two sides into fighting so they’ll all die and release all their energy that Loki and Odin will be able to feed on and get all of the stronger.  And, after figuring out what’s going on and dying and wandering through the underworld and killing his dead wife so she’s finally at peace (in that order), Shadow has to stop it. And he does by pointing out what’s going on.

That is how Gaiman is going to draw me back into sci fic/fantasy exploration. He’s so excellent at fitting pieces together so their internal logic holds true even in paranormal situations like getting his heart weighted against a feather on the underworld scale.

It’s just such a cool blend of exploration, slowly dawning revelation, and anticipation that makes a super compelling read.  

These American lives

Book: American Lives: A Reader

Author: various

Published: 2010 (University of Nebraska Press)

Pages: 300

These chunks pulled from full-length memoirs made good episodic reading that brought me back to earth.

All of them had the same sheen of quiet honesty, which was great because it pulled me into the humor and gravitas with equal strength. But that same sheen made reading things like multiple excerpts on losing children (in utero and born) less affecting than they would have been standing alone. Some of the excerpts were so short I couldn’t tell why they bothered to use that section instead of another.

My favorite, “Son of Mr.Green Jeans: A Meditation on Missing Fathers,” was set up as a list of dictionary-style definitions mixed with personal connections to the concepts being explained. It nicely spiraled into itself to make its point in the way that a kid with a missing father would piece together his feelings about that as he grew up and slowly learned what it meant. That would’ve been super annoying to read in a whole 300-page book, but as a collected piece itself it was really effective.

None of these memoirs were uncomfortably navel-gazing; they all gave good reasons outside their authors for being written. Latched together, they made a smooth patchwork of the genre.

More plain good stuff

Book: The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other Stories

Author: Carson McCullers

Published: 1971 (this edition, Bantam)

These read as Flannery O’Connor light, as in these stories strongly remind me of that more famous authoress and her favorite tropes without making me feel quite as depressed about mankind. O’Connor’s hypothesis seems to be that all people are evil if you give them a chance; McCullers concentrates on pure oddness that still goes bad a lot of times but also has redemptive qualities that nobody knows what to do with.

There’s a detached air of mystery about all the characters, which include a tough country broad and her hunchback distant cousin (in the title novella “The Ballad of the Sad Café”), a young piano prodigy who has to deal with giant expectations that she can’t fulfill (in “Wunderkind”), a transplanted European music teacher with delusions of grandeur that bother the hell out of her new boss for reasons he can’t explain (in “Madame Zilensky and the King of Finland”—I call dibs on that band name), and a jockey who is losing his touch and gaining weight and frustrated to the point of violence about it all (in “The Jockey”).

They’re interesting stories mined from everyday life and told in beautifully simple prose. I can't get enough of that.