American Gods (American Gods, #1) in Into the Forest

Aug 15, 2011 Michele rated it it was amazing

Shelves: favorites, fantasy, fantasy-100-list

I absolutely love this book! It is an unusual, crooked book, and I cannot imagine who I could recommend it to, but it is wonderful!....

Two weeks ago I was headed off to a weekend at my family’s favorite Lake Michigan beach for a last hurrah to summer before school starts back and everyone in my family goes back to work. I wanted some light beach reading. However, the fantasy novel I purchased was a hefty 500+ pages, so I didn’t think I could read it fast enough. I also know that it is the beginn I absolutely love this book! It is an unusual, crooked book, and I cannot imagine who I could recommend it to, but it is wonderful!....

Two weeks ago I was headed off to a weekend at my family’s favorite Lake Michigan beach for a last hurrah to summer before school starts back and everyone in my family goes back to work. I wanted some light beach reading. However, the fantasy novel I purchased was a hefty 500+ pages, so I didn’t think I could read it fast enough. I also know that it is the beginning of a series and has screenplay as well, so I thought I’d save it for later.

I grabbed American Gods at the last minute. I had bought it at least a year ago, after reading Anansi Boys. I didn’t want to start it because what I’d read about it indicated that this was something of an intellectual book, and as I was going to beach I simply didn’t want to think that hard.

However, I am deeply glad that I read this book. By the third chapter I was completely sucked into it. It is intellectual—a fantasy commentary on the nature of religion, worship, sacrifice, metaphor, and ideas, particular to the United States because of its mixed ethnic heritage and our intense relationship with “progress.” One of my favorite lines is near the beginning of the book: “Ideas are more difficult to kill than people, but they can be killed, in the end.”

It is also still a fantasy story. My comments about the depth of this book pricked my husband’s interest, but when I started talking about the fantasy, his eyes began to glaze over. (He is not a fantasy reader.) American Gods is not typical fantasy, although there are gods and magic, undead, and at least a nod toward the concept of good vs. evil. It is a story about a man who thinks of himself as completely unimportant, a man outside the circle of normal American experience, as he is in prison as the book begins. He is chosen to become a part of an upcoming event: a battle between the down-and-out gods of our forefathers versus the young, hip, and vicious gods of modern technology. There is even a bit of a mystery and some outright bizarreness as the main character, Shadow, travels to various tourist meccas of the U.S.

This book addresses the nature of life, prosperity, and the feeling of “being alive.” It reflects on the spirituality of a place—what is it that gives a place, a people, or even a person, power? American Gods gave me a pure intellectual rush. I think it also helped that I already knew a bit about various gods and religious experiences from collecting folklore and mythologies over the years.

American Gods is not a story about “religion in America.” There is no discussion or judgment of one kind of religion as opposed to another. It is more akin to the concept of religion as in Mircea Eliade’s The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (the very first book I read in college; completely overwhelmed me as an almost 18-year old).

Put simply, this book is awesome. It is definitely a book that needs to be chewed rather than swallowed whole; if you follow the story alone without thinking about the concept of how to kill an idea it might make you choke. However, the exploding tastes and thoughts that come with reading this book are well worth the work.

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Nov 18, 2013 Karen Michele Burns rated it really liked it

I have been a Neil Gaiman fan longer than I have been a Goodreads member, and one of my favorites of his is Anansi Boys, which I read at its time of publication in 2005. I loved the connection to the Anansi mythology in the book and have always wanted to go back and read American Gods. I enjoyed the mythology and the gods and the many “coming to America” sections of the book. I wish I had read and kept on hand more background information to help keep all the gods in the book straight. American G ...more

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Jan 20, 2012 Katharina Gerlach rated it liked it

Shelves: young-adult

Well, since I grew up on German folklore and European Gods, I wasn't impressed. The only thread I liked, and the only one I fully remember is that of the missing kids in the Northern town -- and it was only a minor side-thread in the novel. One scene I enjoyed despite not much liking the rest, and that was the visit to the House on the Rocks in Wisconsin. I've been there myself and the description captured the essence of the building very well. It shows that Gaiman does know how to write captiva ...more

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